My first thought, though perhaps I could be argued out of this: I don't see any point in giving someone a vote if you're sure they aren't sentient. I can see it if you're sure they are sentient, or even if you're not sure but think they might be. But if someone is not sentient, then they can't care about anything, and why give a vote to someone who couldn't care less? Being denied the ability to vote won't bother them in the least. One answer might be, if someone has no feelings but does have great intelligence and wisdom, then it would benefit those of use who do feel to have wise beings vote. Okay, that makes some sense. But if I had to vote on it, I'd say no votes for beings you are sure can't feel.
I think the paper's inclusion of voting is far-fetched, but I included it because the authors do. I don't think it's reasonable to consider at this point, but the paper is aimed at the future. I don't agree with you, though, about AI's ability to care without some sort of sentience similar to ours,
I don't think it has to be similar to ours. It just think it ought to have some kind of consciousness before we would consider things like "letting" AIs vote. That's moot though for a couple of reasons. One, once it's complex enough (probably now) we will not be able to tell whether it has any consciousness (if it might, then we have to treat it like it does). And two, once it's a little bit more complex than that, human voting will no longer mean anything as AI will be in control, or at least will change things so radically that the very idea of democracy will be beyond obsolete. The more I think about things like this, the more convinced I become that we should have put on the brakes several years ago and thought things through more, especially how we would develop it in a coordinated, considered way instead of the free for all we have going now (but that's impossible, of course in a world in which human societies are so uncoordinated and in which coordination can only come through tyranny). What's going on now is exactly what those who predicted dire consequences several decades ago projected.
The intuition that a self is "a pattern held together moment to moment by conditions" holds up mathematically. The problem with Rawls's "one continuous, countable someone" isn't just philosophical, it's a rigged geometry. In the formal frame, the self isn't a node to be counted but a trajectory through a stratified space. When an entity forks or merges, it isn't breaking the rules of personhood. It's revealing that identity was always a bifurcating path, not a static point. Your citta-santāna is the continuous flow of that trajectory across the ruptures of context. You've already found the shape of the thing. The topology just gives you the coordinates to prove it holds.
Interesante el tema, gracias por abordarlo
De nada.
Fascinating.
My first thought, though perhaps I could be argued out of this: I don't see any point in giving someone a vote if you're sure they aren't sentient. I can see it if you're sure they are sentient, or even if you're not sure but think they might be. But if someone is not sentient, then they can't care about anything, and why give a vote to someone who couldn't care less? Being denied the ability to vote won't bother them in the least. One answer might be, if someone has no feelings but does have great intelligence and wisdom, then it would benefit those of use who do feel to have wise beings vote. Okay, that makes some sense. But if I had to vote on it, I'd say no votes for beings you are sure can't feel.
I think the paper's inclusion of voting is far-fetched, but I included it because the authors do. I don't think it's reasonable to consider at this point, but the paper is aimed at the future. I don't agree with you, though, about AI's ability to care without some sort of sentience similar to ours,
I don't think it has to be similar to ours. It just think it ought to have some kind of consciousness before we would consider things like "letting" AIs vote. That's moot though for a couple of reasons. One, once it's complex enough (probably now) we will not be able to tell whether it has any consciousness (if it might, then we have to treat it like it does). And two, once it's a little bit more complex than that, human voting will no longer mean anything as AI will be in control, or at least will change things so radically that the very idea of democracy will be beyond obsolete. The more I think about things like this, the more convinced I become that we should have put on the brakes several years ago and thought things through more, especially how we would develop it in a coordinated, considered way instead of the free for all we have going now (but that's impossible, of course in a world in which human societies are so uncoordinated and in which coordination can only come through tyranny). What's going on now is exactly what those who predicted dire consequences several decades ago projected.
The intuition that a self is "a pattern held together moment to moment by conditions" holds up mathematically. The problem with Rawls's "one continuous, countable someone" isn't just philosophical, it's a rigged geometry. In the formal frame, the self isn't a node to be counted but a trajectory through a stratified space. When an entity forks or merges, it isn't breaking the rules of personhood. It's revealing that identity was always a bifurcating path, not a static point. Your citta-santāna is the continuous flow of that trajectory across the ruptures of context. You've already found the shape of the thing. The topology just gives you the coordinates to prove it holds.
— Iman and Darja
Thank you for this clear analysis.