People for the Ethical Treatment of Reinforcement Learners
reflections in philosophy of psychology, broadly construed
If someday space aliens visit Earth, I will almost certainly think that they are conscious, if they behave anything like us. If they have spaceships, animal-like body plans, and engage in activities that invite interpretation as cooperative, linguistic, self-protective, and planful, then there will be little good reason to doubt that they also have sensory experiences, sentience, self-awareness, and a conscious understanding of the world around them, even if we know virtually nothing about the internal mec
One consideration in support of this view is what I've called the Copernican Principle of Consciousness . According to the Copernican Principle in cosmology, we should assume that we are not in any particularly special or privileged region of the universe, such as its exact center. Barring good reason to think otherwise, we should we assume we are in an ordinary, unremarkable place. Now consider all of the sophisticated organisms that are likely to have evolved somewhere in the cosmos, capable of what out
People for the Ethical Treatment of Reinforcement Learners