It is well-written, but I wonder if meat vs non-meat is really the question that should be discussed.
Seems to me, the "rift" (if there is one) is more along the line if thinking and consciousness are "ordinary" physical processes that happen as part of biology - or if they are metaphysical events that take place on a wholly different spiritual plane than our world and are not accessible to physics at all.
If you belong to the former camp, I imagine AIs, non-carbon-based life and other things like this aren't hard to accept as a concept - and if you belong to the latter camp, then I imagine the idea that thinking, feeling and consciousness happens in our brain is already problematic, no need to look at other life forms.
Even excluding the spiritual plane, however, is the question of whether the subjective experience of an "intelligence" implemented in silicon is anything like the subjective experience of an intelligence implemented in meat.
When GPT-3 writes a text, is it experiencing anything like what a human experiences when writing a text, even thought the output of the two processes are increasingly hard to distinguish?
> When GPT-3 writes a text, is it experiencing anything like what a human experiences when writing a text, even thought the output of the two processes are increasingly hard to distinguish?
Seems to me, the "rift" (if there is one) is more along the line if thinking and consciousness are "ordinary" physical processes that happen as part of biology - or if they are metaphysical events that take place on a wholly different spiritual plane than our world and are not accessible to physics at all.
If you belong to the former camp, I imagine AIs, non-carbon-based life and other things like this aren't hard to accept as a concept - and if you belong to the latter camp, then I imagine the idea that thinking, feeling and consciousness happens in our brain is already problematic, no need to look at other life forms.