claim

active

claim:contingent-properties-like-composition-origin-or-similarity-to-human-brains-should-not-define-ethical-consideration-for-novel-agents

Contingent properties like composition, origin, or similarity to human brains should not define ethical consideration for novel agents.

Ethics must be based on empirically-determined cognitive properties (goals, preferences, concerns) rather than parochial markers.

Source paper

extracted_from

Technological Approach to Mind Everywhere: An Experimentally-Grounded Framework for Understanding Diverse Bodies and Minds

(2022) · Levin, Michael

Neighborhood — ranked by edge-count

Communities (3)

community

Active inference & agent ecology
members_of
Free energy minimization, Markov blankets, trust gradients, and multi-agent rhythm/deferral frameworks
Substrate-agnostic behavioral inference of cognition
members_of
Cognition and sentience attributed solely via observable behavior, not neural substrate or species.
Functional criteria for moral patienthood
members_of
Framework grounding ethical consideration in goal-directedness and agency rather than substrate or origin, addressing moral status of novel intelligences.

Concepts (1)

concept

Continuum of cognitive capacities
associated_with
Core TAME tenet that cognitive capacities form a continuum without binary bright lines, essential for gradualist approach.

Related by similarity (8)

cosine ≥ 0.65 · no typed edge

Entities in the same semantic neighborhood but without a typed relation to this one — candidates for new edges or unrecognized duplicates.

What degree of concern and care should we exhibit toward the many diverse agents around us, and what criteria do we use to identify sentience, capacity for suffering, and other properties that have moral implications?question0.810
Central question motivating the paper.
Smith & Boyd (1991) criteria are irrelevant across the vast majority of the space of possible agents.claim0.805
Dismissal of earlier criteria as too narrow.
Crump et al. (2022) offer a well-argued example of an essential development: a rigorous framework for assessing sentience from the perspective of moral concern over an agent's welfare.claim0.801
Levin's endorsement of the target paper's contribution.
Ethics of novel beings should be based on teleonomic capacity (scale of goals they can pursue).claim0.799
Proposal for a new ethical framework.
Intelligence and cognition exist on a continuum; modern bioscience offers no support for clean bright-line distinctions between cognitive and non-cognitive beings.claim0.796
Anti-essentialism claim: questions like 'is it cognitive?' are scientifically unjustified; modern view must ask 'what kind' and 'how much'.
There is no consensus ethical framework for the creation of new sentient minds — neither for biological children nor for AI — that is grounded in principled theoryquestion0.796
Identified as a major unsolved problem that AI makes newly urgent
There is no principled continuum of ethical concern that scales from simple homeostatic agents to complex metacognitive beings, allowing rational allocation of moral statusquestion0.795
Central gap that Diverse Intelligence is proposed to fill
Biology's robustness, open-endedness, evolvability, and unique complexity likely depend on the fact that evolution works with an agential material.claim0.795
Central claim linking life's properties to the inherent competencies of its material substrate.

Cross-corpus bridges (12)

same_concept_as · Nomic cosine

External markdown files that talk about the same concept as this entity.

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What are the appropriate criteria for assessing sentience in novel, unconventional agents that lack familiar phylogenetic origins or anatomical structures?questions/what-are-the-appropriate-criteria-for-assessing-sentience.md0.846
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What ethical obligations do humans have toward non-traditional forms of intelligence and agency?questions/what-ethical-obligations-do-humans-have-toward-nontraditional.md0.830
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How can we develop ethics recognizing diversity of possible minds rather than human-centric criteria?questions/how-can-we-develop-ethics-recognizing-diversity-of.md0.827
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What ethical frameworks and relationships should guide human interaction with non-standard minds and engineered biological entities?questions/what-ethical-frameworks-and-relationships-should-guide-human.md0.825
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What ethical framework is appropriate for novel engineered minds with unfamiliar substrates?questions/what-ethical-framework-is-appropriate-for-novel-engineered.md0.822
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How can we relate morally to beings in unconventional embodiments when current distinctions based on origin or composition will not survive?questions/how-can-we-relate-morally-to-beings-in.md0.818
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Can we extend care and moral consideration to beings with radically different embodiments and substrates, including AI and alien intelligences?questions/can-we-extend-care-and-moral-consideration-to.md0.817
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If humans lack uniform, well-defined values and struggle with internal inconsistencies, how can we develop models of ethical intelligence applicable to humanity as a whole?questions/if-humans-lack-uniform-welldefined-values-and-struggle.md0.817
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How should we establish moral responsibility toward diverse agents when verbal reports and brain homology are insufficient indicators of sentience?questions/how-should-we-establish-moral-responsibility-toward-diverse.md0.816
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How should AI safety and ethics frameworks be reconsidered if minds exist at vastly different scales than humans?questions/how-should-ai-safety-and-ethics-frameworks-be.md0.815
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If humans lack uniform values and struggle with internal contradictions, how can we develop ethical AI models applicable to humanity as a whole?questions/if-humans-lack-uniform-values-and-struggle-with.md0.814
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What novel ethical frameworks are needed for relating to artificially created beings with no familiar phylogenetic touchstone?questions/what-novel-ethical-frameworks-are-needed-for-relating.md0.814