TheCriticalRat posted my article Animal Rights Issues Regarding Software and AGI on the Debate A Vegan SubReddit.

This post shares a discussion highlight where I wrote something I consider interesting and important. The main issue is about the inadequacy of academia.

The two large blockquotes are messages from pdxthehunted and the non-quotes are me. I made judgment calls about newline spacing for reproducing pdxthehunted's messages and I changed the format for the two footnotes.

This came up a few weeks ago, when u/curi was posing questions on this subreddit. I looked through some of Elliot's work then and did so again just now. I'm not accusing them of being here in bad faith--they seem like they are legitimately interested in thinking about this topic and are asking interesting questions/making interesting claims.

That being said, they also seem to have little or no formal education in philosophy of mind or AGI. All of their links to who they are circle back to their own commercial website/blog, where they sell their services as a rationalist philosopher/consultant. It appears that they are (mostly) self-taught. Their (supposed)[1] connection to David Deutsch is why I bothered even to look further.

I don't think you need to have a degree to understand even advanced tenets in philosophy of mind or artificial intelligence. The problem here is that Elliot seems to have written an enormous amount--possibly thousands of pages--but has never been published in any peer-reviewed journal (at least none that I have access to through my community college) and so their credibility is questionable. Judging from their previous interactions on this sub, Elliot seems to have created their own curriculum and field of expertise.

I was impressed by the scope and seriousness of their work (the little I took the time to read). Still, it's very problematic for debate: they seem to be looking for someone who has the exact same intellectual background as they do--but without any kind of standardization, it's very hard to know what that is without investing possibly hundreds of hours into reading his corpus. This is the benefit of academic credentials; we can engage with someone under the assumption that they know what they're talking about. Most of Elliot's citations and links are to their own blog--not to any peer-reviewed, actual science. I suspect that's why they've left the caveat that "blog posts are okay."

A very quick browse through Academic Search Premier found over 100 published peer-reviewed journal articles on nonhuman animals and general intelligence. I browsed the abstracts of the first three, all of which discuss general intelligence in nonhuman animals. General intelligence is hard to define--especially in a way that doesn't immediately bias it in favor of humans--but even looking at the usual suspects in cognition demonstrate that many animals possess it unless we move the goalposts to human-specific achievements like writing symphonies or building spacecraft (which of course leaves the vast majority of all humans who've ever existed in the cold).

In short--not to be rude or dismissive--but the reason that animal rights activists aren't concerned about the "algorithms" that animals have that "give them the capacity to suffer" (forgive me if I'm misquoting) is that it is a non-issue. No serious biologists doubt that nonhuman animals (at least mammals and birds) can have preferences for or against different mental states and that those preferences can be frustrated or thwarted. Pain and suffering are fitness-selecting traits that allowed animals to avoid danger and seek nourishment and mates. I'm not an expert in any of your claimed domains; that being said, to believe that consciousness and the capacity to suffer evolved only in one species of primate demonstrates a shockingly naive understanding of evolution, philosophy of mind, cognitive science/neuroscience, and biology.

Similar questions can be asked about general intelligence. My answer to that is we don’t entirely know. We haven’t yet written an AGI. So what should we think in the meantime? We can look at whether all animal behavior is consistent with non-AGI, non-conscious, non-suffering robots with the same sorts of features and design as present day software and robots that we have created and do understand. Is there any evidence to differentiate an animal from non-AGI software? I’m not aware of any, although I’ve had many people point me to examples of animal behavior that are blatantly compatible with non-AGI programming algorithms.

There is no "scoop" here. There are a few serious philosophers I've read--Daniel Dennett, for instance--who I think make similar arguments as you're making here, which we can call the "animals as automata" meme. The very fact that you believe that cows show no more intelligence than a self-driving car makes me feel very suspicious that you don't know what you're talking about. Nick Bostrum basically states in his AI opus Superintelligence that if humans managed to emulate a rodent mind, we would have mostly solved human-level AGI.

To claim that there are "no examples" of an animal doing something that a non-AGI robot couldn't[2] do discredits your entire thesis--you're either woefully misinformed, or disingenuous. Again, I'm very impressed by your (Elliot's) obvious dedication to learning and thinking. Still, I don't think this argument is even to the point where it's refined enough to take seriously. There's so much wrong with it that betrays not just a lack of competence in adjacent disciplines but also an arrogance around the author's imagined brilliance that it feels awkward and unrewarding to engage with.

EDIT 12/2: [1] Connection to Deutsch--though not necessarily relevant to this argument--is not overstated.

[2] Changed would to couldn't

Suppose I'm right about ~everything. What should I do that would fix these problems?

Thanks for the response. Also, I checked the Beginning of Infinity and saw that you don't seem to be exaggerating your claim (obviously you know this--I'm mentioning it for any skeptics). Elliot Temple is not only listed in the acknowledgments of BOI, but they are given special thanks from the author. That's very cool, regardless of anything else. Congratulations. I'm hesitant to do too much cognitive work for you on how to fix your problems--it sounds like you're used to charging people a fair amount of money to do the same. Still, I engaged with you here, so I'll let you know what I think.

Read More

You need to become better read in adjacent fields--cognitive neuroscience, ethology, evolutionary biology, ethics--these are just a few that come up off the top of my head. If you're right about more or less everything, peer-reviewed research done by actual scientists in most of these fields should agree with your thesis. If it doesn't, make a weaker claim.

Publish

Right now, your argument is formatted as a blog post. Anyone with access to a computer is technically capable of self-publishing thousands of pages of their thoughts. Write an article and submit it to an academic journal for peer review. Any publication that survives the peer-review process will give you more credibility. I'm not saying that's fair, but it is a useful heuristic for nonexperts to decide whether or not you are worth their time. An alternative would be to see your blog posts cited in books by experts (for instance, Eliezer Yudkowsky has no formal secondary education, but his ideas are good enough that he is credited by other experts in his field).

Empiricism/Falsifiability

As it currently stands, you're essentially making a claim and insisting that others disprove it. This, of course, is acceptable as a Reddit discussion or a blog post--but is not suitable for uncovering the truth. I can insist that my pet rock has a subjective experience and refuse to believe otherwise unless someone can prove it to me, but I won't be taken seriously (nor should I be). Could you design an experiment that tests a falsifiable claim about nonhuman animal general intelligence? (Or, alternatively, find one that has already been published demonstrating that only humans possess it?) What would it look like?

What computations, what information processing, what inputs or outputs to what algorithms, what physical states of computer systems like brains indicates or is consciousness? I have the same question for suffering too.

We don't know the answer to these questions. Staking your thesis on possible answers to open questions might be a way to stalemate internet debates, but won't deepen your or anyone else's understanding.

Gatekeeping

You're widely read and the depth of your knowledge/understanding in some areas is significant. You need to recognize that some people will have different foundations than yours--they might be very well-read on evolutionary biology--but have less of an understanding of Turing computability. Instead of rudely dismissing arguments that are outside of the disciplines you're most comfortable with, try to meet these people on their level. What do they have to teach you? What thinkers can they expose you to? Your self-curated curriculum is impressive but uneven and far from comprehensive. Try a little humility. Assuming you're right about everything, you should be able to communicate it to experts outside of your field.

Closing

I think that advice is good whether or not you're correct; if you are, people far more intelligent than I should start to recognize it. If you aren't, you might be able to clarify where you went wrong and either abandon your claim or reformulate it to make a weaker--but possibly true--version.

Lastly, I encourage anyone observing from the sidelines to use Google Scholar or similar if you have an interest in animal general intelligence. I linked an article above; here it is again. The article references 60 others and has been cited in 14. This does not mean that the authors' findings are replicable or ironclad, but again--it is a useful heuristic in deciding what kind of probability we want to assign to the likelihood it is on the right track, especially when the alternative is trying to read through hundreds of pages of random blog posts so that we can meet an interlocutor on their level.

To find that article, I searched for "general intelligence in animals" using Academic Search Premier. Pubmed and Google Scholar might find similar results. I filtered out all articles that were not subject to peer review or were published before 2012. It was the 4th search result out of over 50 published in the last seven years. Science may never be finished or solvable, but nonhuman animal's capacity to learn, have intentional states, preferences, and experience pain are not really still open questions in relevant disciplines.

If I'm right about ~everything, that includes my views of the broad irrationality of academia and the negative value of current published research in many of the fields in question.

For example, David Deutsch's static meme idea, available in BoI, was rejected for academic publication ~20 years earlier. Academia gatekeeps to keep out ideas they don't want to hear, and they don't really debate what's true much in journals. It's like a highly moderated forum with biased moderators following unwritten and inconsistent rules (like reddit but stricter!).

My arguments re animals are largely Deutsch's. He taught me his worldview. The reason he doesn't write it up and publish it in a journal is because (he believes that) it either wouldn't be published or wouldn't be listened to (and it would alienate people who will listen to his physics papers). The same goes for many other important ideas he has. Being in the Royal Society, etc., is inadequate to effectively get past the academic gatekeeping (to get both published and seriously, productively engaged with). I don't think a PhD and 20 published papers would help either (especially not with issues involving many fields at once). I don't think people would, at that point, start considering and learning different ideas than what they already have, e.g. learning Critical Rationalism so they could apply that framework to animal rights to reach a conclusion like "If Critical Rationalism is true, then animal rights is wrong." (And CR is not the only controversial premise I use that people are broadly ignorant of, so it's harder than that.) People commonly dismiss others, despite many credentials, if they don't like the message. I don't think playing the game of authority and credentials – an irrational game – will solve the problem of people's disinterest in truth-seeking. This is view of academia is, again, a view Deutsch taught me.

Karl Popper published a ton but was largely ignored. Thomas Szasz too. There are many other examples. Even if I got published, I could easily be treated like e.g. Richard Lindzen who has published articles doubting some claims about global warming.

Instead of rudely dismissing arguments that are outside of the disciplines you're most comfortable with, try to meet these people on their level.

If I'm right about ~everything (premise), that includes that I'm right about my understanding of evolutionary biology, which is an area I've studied a lot (as has Deutsch). That's not outside my comfort zone.

I think that advice is good whether or not you're correct; if you are, people far more intelligent than I should start to recognize it.

We disagree about the current state of the world. How many smart people exist, how many competent people exist in what fields, how reasonable are intellectuals, what sort of things do they do, etc. You mention Eliezer Yudkowsky, who FYI agrees with me about this something like this particular issue, e.g. he denies "civilizational adequacy", and says the world is on fire, in Hero Licenscing. OTOH, he's also the same guy who took moderator action to suppress discussion of Critical Rationalism on his site because – according to him – it was downvoted a lot (factually there were lots of downvotes, but I mean he actually said that was his reason for taking moderator action – so basically just suppressing unpopular ideas on the basis that they are unpopular). He has publicly claimed Critical Rationalism is crap but has never written anything substantive about that and won't debate, answer counter-arguments, or endorse any criticism of Critical Rationalism written by someone else (and I'm pretty confident there is no public evidence that he knows much about CR).

The reason I asked about how to fix this is I think your side of the debate, including academic institutions and their alleged adequacy, are blocking error correction. They don't allow any reasonable or realistic way that, if I'm right, it gets fixed. FYI I've written about the general topic of how intellectuals are closed to ideas and what rational methods of truth seeking look like, e.g. Paths Forward. The basic theme of that article is about doing intellectual activities in such a way that, if you're wrong, and someone knows you're wrong, and they're willing to tell you, you don't prevent them from correcting you. Currently ~everyone is doing that wrong. (Of course there are difficulties like how to do this in a time-efficient manner, which I go into. It's not an easy problem to solve but I think it is solvable.)

Lastly, I encourage anyone observing from the sidelines to use Google Scholar or similar if you have an interest in animal general intelligence. I linked an article above; here it is again.

PS, FYI it's readily apparent from the first sentence of the abstract of that article that it's based on an intellectual framework which contradicts the one in The Beginning of Infinity. It views intelligence in a different way than we do, which must be partly due to some epistemology ideas which are not stated or cited in the paper. And it doesn't contain the string "compu" so it isn't engaging with our framework re computation either (instead it's apparently making unstated, uncited background assumptions again, which I fear may not even be thought through).

I guess you'll think that, in that case, I should debate epistemologists, not animal rights advocates. Approach one of the biggest points of disagreements more directly. I don't object to that. I do focus a lot on epistemology and issues closer to it. The animal welfare thing is a side project. But the situation in academic epistemology has the same problems I talked about in my sibling post and is, overall, IMO, worse. Also, even if I convinced many epistemologists, that might not help much, considering lots of what I was saying about computation is already a standard (sorta, see quote) view among experts. Deutsch actually complains about that last issue in The Fabric of Reality (bold text emphasized by me):

The Turing principle, for instance, has hardly ever been seriously doubted as a pragmatic truth, at least in its weak forms (for example, that a universal computer could render any physically possible environment). Roger Penrose's criticisms are a rare exception, for he understands that contradicting the Turing principle involves contemplating radically new theories in both physics and epistemology, and some interesting new assumptions about biology too. Neither Penrose nor anyone else has yet actually proposed any viable rival to the Turing principle, so it remains the prevailing fundamental theory of computation. Yet the proposition that artificial intelligence is possible in principle, which follows by simple logic from this prevailing theory, is by no means taken for granted. (An artificial intelligence is a computer program that possesses properties of the human mind including intelligence, consciousness, free will and emotions, but runs on hardware other than the human brain.) The possibility of artificial intelligence is bitterly contested by eminent philosophers (including, alas, Popper), scientists and mathematicians, and by at least one prominent computer scientist. But few of these opponents seem to understand that they are contradicting the acknowledged fundamental principle of a fundamental discipline. They contemplate no alternative foundations for the discipline, as Penrose does. It is as if they were denying the possibility that we could travel to Mars, without noticing that our best theories of engineering and physics say that we can. Thus they violate a basic tenet of rationality — that good explanations are not to be discarded lightly.

But it is not only the opponents of artificial intelligence who have failed to incorporate the Turing principle into their paradigm. Very few others have done so either. The fact that four decades passed after the principle was proposed before anyone investigated its implications for physics, and a further decade passed before quantum computation was discovered, bears witness to this. People were accepting and using the principle pragmatically within computer science, but it was not integrated with their overall world-view.

I think we live in a world where you can be as famous as Turing, have ~everyone agree you're right, and still have many implications of your main idea substantively ignored for decades (or forever. Applying Turing to physics is a better result than has happened with many other ideas, and Turing still isn't being applied to AI adequately). As Yudkowsky says, it's not an adequate world.

Update: Read more of this discussion at Discussing Animal Intelligence

Our society has had great success due to the division of labor. People economically specialize. We have farmers, lawyers, barbers, bakers, security guards, inventors, novelists, architects, engineers, programmers, managers, marketers, etc.

Division of labor is far more efficient than everyone living independently and doing a little of each job. It lets people focus a large portion of their time, attention and learning on one area. As a result, they get better at it.

Trade is what makes division of labor work. I don't farm or bake but I can trade for corn and bread. Trade is how I benefit from other people doing something.

This system plays a big role in our lives. We're all familiar with it even if we don't really think about it or study economics. Besides providing material prosperity, it has led to certain psychological attitudes.

I don't know how most things work and I get them from specialists. I don't know how to repair a car so I rely on a mechanic. I don't know how to write a good poem so I get poems from poets. I don't know how to paint so I get my paintings from people who do. I do know how to create software, but I still get most of my software from other people who specialize in that particular type of software.

People have developed an attitude of not knowing how most things work and not needing to. Someone else will do it better than I would, anyway. For almost everything, there is a specialist who's better at it than me. If I do it, other than my career, it's just a hobby for fun.

This attitude is partly reasonable but partly dangerous. People can overestimate experts.

There don't actually exist good specialists for every speciality. Some areas have too few people working in them, e.g. life extension, AGI or epistemology. In some areas, tons of experts are wrong, e.g. Keynesian economists and Kantian philosophers.

People overestimate medicine's ability to fix their problems. Many surgeries and medications are cruder and less effective than people think. It's good that they exist. They're good options to have. But they aren't just safe, perfectly effective and wonderful. They're risky and doctors downplay the risks and side effects. Doctors can't fix everything and lots of the fixes have a meaningful chance of breaking something.

Worse are experts for mental, not physical, problems. Sad? Go talk to a "professional" to get help for your "depression". Marriage problems? There's an expert for that. Kid doesn't listen in school? There are experts for that. But these people don't know much about ideas. They are neither philosophers nor scientists. They can give some basic self-help advice and they can use social pressure to manipulate people. The whole field isn't merely largely ineffective, it's dangerous with its brain-disabling drugs, it's imprisonment without trial ("involuntary commitment"), and how it misdirects people away from solving their own problems with self-improvement, studying better ideas, and other productive activities.

Experts encourage people to be irresponsible. Don't worry about it, the expert is responsible for getting a good outcome. But people are often disappointed by the outcome the expert provides. It's your life. You have to live with the outcome. You need to judge which experts are effective enough and when you need to take matters into your own hands.

Many types of experts are fine. People who produce material goods for sale are broadly OK. People who provide relatively simple or easily evaluated services are broadly OK. The longer term the issue is, and the more ongoing interaction with the specialist is needed, the more you should be careful.

The most dangerous experts that people consult directly are "mental health" experts. That whole industry is poison.

The capabilities of physical doctors are overestimated but they're basically on your side, try to help, and mostly make things better. Mental doctors make a lot of things worse. Many people regret interacting with them, and others are brainwashed/indoctrinated/pressured to the point they have trouble thinking critically about it and forming an independent opinion of their psychology or psychiatry experiences.

The most dangerous experts that people deal with indirectly are philosophers. Most people don't read philosophy books but they pick up ideas, here and there, about learning, knowledge, critical thinking, reason, morality, political principles, the metaphysical nature of reality, etc. Many of those ideas are badly wrong. They lead to people being irrational, unreasonable, bad at learning, biased, etc., which makes things worse throughout their lives. Economists also spread a ton of really bad ideas to people indirectly.

Many people think "gendering" a child might be bad.

That means: Teaching the boy role to a boy might be bad. Teaching the girl role to a girl might be bad.

No one considers that teaching the child role to a child might be bad.

I think the child role is more impactful (for good or bad) than a gender role. There's a much larger difference between young children (e.g. a 5 year old) and adults than between men and women. I'd estimate that under 20% of the adult/child difference is due to the child's learned social role, but the social role is still a big factor.

The child social role has a lasting impact after childhood. People don't just forget being children. And people transition in stages where they e.g. put effort into differentiating themselves from a child. When reacting to a former role is a significant part of one's life, then that role is still impactful.

Adults put substantial ongoing effort into avoiding being childlike. It prevents them from doing much learning. They don't want to be beginners or learners because that's for children. It also prevents adults from having some types of fun. Curiosity is another childish trait which adults suppress a lot of.

Most people are mostly respectful of both genders. They don't have a significant grudge against either gender. By contrast, people are frequently hateful of the child role. They dislike and mistreat children routinely. Teaching your offspring a social role that you don't respect, then disrespecting them for years, is a nasty system. People think children are stupid and use the fact that they do child social role behaviors – while adults don't – as proof.

I made Discussion Tree: State of Animal Rights Debate. My tree diagram summarizes pro-animal-rights arguments from Peter Singer and asks some questions about major issues he didn’t cover. It reveals that his arguments were incomplete. The incompleteness I’ve focused on is that they don’t address issues related to computers and software. Maybe animals are like self-driving cars with some extra features, not like humans. Self-driving cars aren’t intelligent, conscious or capable of suffering. Singer doesn’t try to address that issue.

I did additional research to find arguments to add to my discussion tree. I found no answers to basic computer science questions from the animal welfare advocates.

I posted to five pro animal rights forums asking for links to written material (like books, articles, or blog posts) making arguments that Singer didn’t make, so I could read about why they’re right. I received no relevant responses and almost zero interest.

Later, I and others posted to eleven more places. Although this resulted in a bunch of discussion, I was not referred to a single piece of relevant literature. No one had a single piece of evidence to differentiate animals from fancy self-driving cars, nor any substantive argument. Many people insulted me. None had a scientific, materialist worldview, incorporating computer science principles, and could give any argument against my position which is compatible with that type of worldview. Nor did they give arguments that that kind of worldview is false. No one said anything that could plausibly have changed my mind. And people didn’t quote from my discussion tree and respond, nor suggest text for a new node. I linked and documented lots of the discussion on this page.

I was referred to dozens of pieces of literature, but none were relevant. In general, searching for terms like “software”, “hardware”, “algorithm” and “compu” immediately showed the source was irrelevant.

I also went to a vegan Discord for a YouTube debater to ask if they could help me improve my discussion tree diagram. I streamed what happened. Summary: They laughed at my view, then asked me to debate in voice chat (instead of giving literature), then banned me for not responding in 30 seconds while they knew I was busy fixing an audio issue.

This illustrates several things. First, my discussion tree shows how you can begin researching a topic in an organized way. You can pick a topic and create something similar. If you want to learn, it’s a great approach.

Second, there’s a serious lack of interest in discussion or debate in the world, and most people are quite ignorant and don’t even know of sources which argue why their beliefs are correct. They have some sources for why they’re right and rival views X and Y are wrong, but no answer to view Z, and will just keep giving you their answers to X and Y. Are you better or do you know of anyone who is better? Speak up.

Third, animal rights advocates broadly don’t know anything about computers and software and haven’t tried to update their thinking to take that stuff into account. Sad!

I encourage people to try creating a discussion tree on a topic that interests them, then ask for help finding sources and adding arguments to it. See what people, with what conclusions, have anything they’re willing to contribute, or not. You’ll learn a lot about the topic and about the rationality of the advocates of each viewpoint. It’ll help you judge issues yourself instead of deferring to the conclusions of experts (rather than their arguments). Even if you were happy to defer to expert opinions, it’s hard because experts disagree with each other; a discussion tree can help you organize those expert arguments.

You can also use discussion trees to organize and keep track of debates/discussions you have – as the conversation goes along, keep notes in a tree diagram.

I made a video covering these events and more. It’s from when I’d gotten almost no answers, rather than a bunch of bad answers. And I streamed a bunch of my discussions when I got bad answers.

While discussing, I wrote several additional blog posts, including a second discussion tree.

This content was borrowed from my free email newsletter. Sign up here.

This is a discussion tree based on many discussions with animal welfare advocates related to my Peter Singer discussion tree.

Is it missing an important argument? Comment below about what should be added.

Click the diagram to expand or view the PDF for selectable text.

See also: Posts about animals.

In the comments below, reply saying which is the first sentence you disagree with, and why you disagree.

Minds are software. Suffering is a state of mind. Physical information signals, whether from the eyes or from pain nerves, have to be processed by the software before they can cause suffering, be liked or disliked, etc. Before that they're just raw data and no meaning has been determined yet by the conscious mind.

Brains (both human and animal) are universal classical computers. The hardware between humans and some animals is similar. Hardware similarity doesn't tell you about software similarity. Computation is hardware independent. Similar or even identical hardware can run totally different computations. Studying hardware and comparing hardware similarities is a red herring.

All animal behavior follows algorithms specified by their genes. Human genes specify a different type of algorithm – general intelligence – which involves the ability to create/design new knowledge, just as biological evolution created/designed the knowledge of optics in our eyes, the knowledge for how to build a computer out of neurons, the knowledge for what situations a rabbit should run away in, etc. General intelligence is the ability to evolve new knowledge. It’s the ability to replicate ideas with variation and selection, just as biological evolution proceeds by replicating genes with variation and selection. With animals, all the knowledge comes from biological evolution. Humans can do evolution of ideas inside their brains to create new knowledge, animals can’t.

The Cambridge Declaration on Consciousness (2012):

The field of Consciousness research is rapidly evolving. Abundant new techniques and strategies for human and non-human animal research have been developed. Consequently, more data is becoming readily available, and this calls for a periodic reevaluation of previously held preconceptions in this field.

ok

Studies of non-human animals have shown that homologous brain circuits correlated with conscious experience and perception can be selectively facilitated and disrupted to assess whether they are in fact necessary for those experiences. Moreover, in humans, new non-invasive techniques are readily available to survey the correlates of consciousness.

No. Wrong just in this summary, unsourced, and focusing on correlation instead of causation.

You can’t tell what is “necessary” by turning some things on and off. You turn off X and then Y doesn’t happen. Does that mean X is necessary to Y? No, some Z you didn’t consider could cause or allow Y. So they’re making a basic logic error.

And how can you do a correlation study involving “conscious experience” in non-human animals? How do you know if or when they have any conscious experience at all?

The neural substrates of emotions do not appear to be confined to cortical structures.

These people don’t seem to understand the hardware independence of computation. Or they think emotions are non-computational or something. But they don’t explain what they think and address the computer science issues.

In fact, subcortical neural networks aroused during affective states in humans are also critically important for generating emotional behaviors in animals.

Wait lol, after they brought up emotions the next sentence (this one) switches from emotions to “emotional behaviors”. Emotional behaviors are behaviors which look emotional according to some cultural intuitions of some researchers. This ain’t science.

The rest is more of the same crap that doesn’t address the issues or give sources, so I’m stopping now.

Claim: Animal rights may be refuted by advanced Critical Rationalist (CR) epistemology, including the jump to universality, but most people (pro or anti animal rights) haven’t read and understood The Beginning of Infinity and have a different view of epistemology. Given that ignorance of CR, their belief in animal rights is reasonable. And their failure to understand my questions and challenges of their beliefs is also reasonable. (This claim is based on a comment by TheRat on Discord.)

I disagree with that claim. The purpose of this post is to restate my main question/challenge for animal rights and then to argue that it should be understandable, and be seen as an issue worth answering, by someone who has never heard of CR. The issue is related to software not CR. I will further claim that a non-programmer should be able to understand the question/problem/issue and see that it matters (even though he’ll have a hard time reaching a conclusion about the answer without being able to understand code).

Note: I do have other arguments against animal rights which rely on CR.

The Programmer’s Challenge to Animal Rights

Claim: Animals are complex robots. Humans are different because they have general intelligence – the thing that AGI (Artificial General Intelligence) researchers are trying to program but haven’t yet been able to. All known and documented animal behavior is compatible with animals lacking general intelligence (example).

Animals are built with with different materials (more carbon, less metal). This difference is irrelevant. Similarly, the “artificial” in Artificial General Intelligence doesn’t matter either.

Animals are fundamentally similar to a self-driving car, to board game playing software in a robot with (or without) an arm that can move the pieces around the board, and to “AI” controlled video game characters. Those, like all human-written software that exists today, are all examples of non-AGI (non-general intelligence) algorithms. And the lack of a physical body in some cases important (a robot body could be built and added without changing the intelligence of the software).

Brains of both animals and humans are universal classical computers (Turing complete), just like Macs and iPhones, which run software. The relevant differences are software algorithm differences. People who deny this are ignorant and/or unscientific.

Further Explanation

All software we know how to write today is inadequate to achieve general intelligence. So to claim animals have moral rights like humans, people should argue that animals do things which fundamentally differ from current software. So far I have been unable to find any serious attempt to do this.

Alternatively, someone could come up with a distinguishing feature of software algorithms other than having or lacking general intelligence, show that some animals have that feature, and explain why that feature has moral relevance. I’ve also been unable to find any serious attempt to do this.

Whether general intelligence has moral relevance is non-obvious. Regardless, a reasonable person should agree it might have major moral relevance and therefore this is an issue worth investigating for those curious about animal rights. If there is no animal rights literature trying to do this sort of analysis, and addressing these issues, that’s a significant gap in their arguments.

People denying that general intelligence has moral relevance should specify what else humans have, which robots lack, which they think has moral relevance. A common answer to that is the capacity to suffer. I have been unable to find any animal rights literature that tries to differentiate humans or AGIs from self-driving cars and non-AGI software in terms of ability to suffer. What is it about a human’s software, what trait matters other than general intelligence, that grants the capacity to suffer? If they answered that, then we could investigate whether animal software has that trait or not.

I think capacity to suffer is related to general intelligence because suffering involves making value judgments like not wanting a particular outcome or thinking something is bad. Suffering involves having preferences/wants which you then don’t get. I don’t think it’s possible without the ability to consider alternatives and make value judgments about which you prefer, which requires creative thought and the ability to create new knowledge, think of new things. This is a very brief argument which I’m not going to elaborate on here. My main goal is to challenge animal rights advocates. What is their position on this matter and where are their arguments?

What I’ve mostly found is that people don’t want to think about computer algorithms. They don’t know how to program and they aren’t scientists. They don’t know (or deny without educated arguments) that brains are literally universal classical computers (Turing complete), that information and computation is part of physical reality and physics, that human minds are literally equivalent to some sort of software, and other things like that. That’s OK. Not everyone is an expert.

That’s why I’ve been asking (see the comments in addition to the post) to be referred to literature from someone who does know how to program, understands some of these basic issues, and then makes a case for animal rights. Where are the people with relevant expertise about computers and AGI who favor animal rights and write arguments? I can’t find any. That’s bad for the case for animal rights!

Note: My relevant views on AGI are mainstream for the field. I disagree with the mainstream views in the AGI field on some advanced details, but the basic stuff I’m discussing here is widely agreed on. That doesn’t prove it’s true or anything, but a mainstream view merits some analysis and argument rather than being ignored. (Even obscure views often merit a reply, but I won’t get into that.) If animal rights advocates have failed to consider mainstream AGI ideas, that’s bad.

Consciousness

Besides suffering and general intelligence, the other main trait brought up in animal rights discussions is consciousness. If animals are conscious, that gives them moral value. These three traits are related, e.g. consciousness seems to be a prerequisite of suffering, and consciousness may be a prerequisite or consequence of general intelligence.

What computations, what information processing, what inputs or outputs to what algorithms, what physical states of computer systems like brains indicates or is consciousness? I have the same question for suffering too.

Similar questions can be asked about general intelligence. My answer to that is we don’t entirely know. We haven’t yet written an AGI. So what should we think in the meantime? We can look at whether all animal behavior is consistent with non-AGI, non-conscious, non-suffering robots with the same sorts of features and design as present day software and robots that we have created and do understand. Is there any evidence to differentiate an animal from non-AGI software? I’m not aware of any, although I’ve had many people point me to examples of animal behavior that are blatantly compatible with non-AGI programming algorithms. Humans are different because lots of their behavior is not explainable in terms of current software algorithms. Humans create new knowledge, e.g. about spaceships and vaccines, that isn’t programmed in their genes. And humans do that regarding many different topics, seemingly all, hence the idea of “general” intelligence. I have yet to see evidence that any animal does that on even one topic, let alone generally.

Many of the arguments about consciousness involve the rejection of what I regard as science. E.g. they advocate dualism – they claim that there is something other than the material world. They claim that consciousness is a fundamental, non-physical part of reality. They deny that physics can explain and account for everything that exists.

I regard dualism as bad philosophy but I won’t go into that. I’ll just say that if the case for animal rights relies on the rejection of modern physics and the scientific-materialist view of the world, they’ve got a serious problem which they should address. Where can I read literature telling me why I should change my view of science and accept claims like theirs, which addresses the kind of doubts an atheist who believes in objective physical reality would have? I haven’t gotten any answers to that so far. Instead I’m told assertions which I regard as factually false, e.g. that information is not physical. People who say things like that seem to be unfamiliar with standard views in physics (example paper).

The Argument for Conservatism

Animal rights advocates claim that, if in doubt, we should err on the side of caution. If the science and philosophy of mind isn’t fully figured out, then we should assume animals have moral value just in case they do. Even if there’s only a 1% chance that animals have rights, it’s a bad idea to slaughter them by the millions. I agree.

Pro-life (anti-abortion) advocates make the same argument regarding human fetuses. The science and philosophy aren’t fully settled, so when in doubt we should avoid the chance of murdering millions of human beings, even if it’s a low chance. I agree with that too. I think most animal rights advocates disagree with that or refuse to take it into account so that they can favor abortion. I think this indicates some political bias and double standards. I imagine there are some pro-life animal rights activists, but I think most aren’t, which I think is screwy.

Despite agreeing with these arguments, I’m pro-abortion and pro-slaughtering-farm-animals. The reason I favor abortion is I don’t have any significant doubt about whether a 3 month old fetus, which doesn’t not yet have a brain with electrical activity, is intelligence. I haven’t carefully researched the scientific details about abortion (I would if I was actually deciding the law), but from what I’ve seen, banning third trimester abortions is a reasonable and conservative option.

The reason I favor slaughtering cows is that I have no significant doubt about whether a cow has general intelligence. I’ve seen zero indicators that it does, and I’ve debated many people about this, asked many animal rights advocates for things to read which argue their case, asked for examples of animals doing things which are different than what a non-AGI robot could do, and so on. The total lack of relevant counter-argument from the other side is just the same as with abortion and is about equally conclusive. When all the arguments go one way, one can reasonably reach a conclusion and act on it instead of endlessly doubting. (When argument X has logical priority over Y, then Y is excluded from “all the arguments”. And when argument P is conclusively refuted by argument Q, then P is excluded from “all the arguments”.)

My Expertise

Because I’m asking for arguments from someone familiar with software and AGI rather than from just anyone, I think it’s fair that I share my own background.

I’m a philosopher and programmer. My speciality is epistemology (the philosophy of knowledge, including how to think, learn and reason, and how to evaluate ideas and arguments). I study and contribute to the Critical Rationalist epistemology of Karl Popper and David Deutsch, which I believe is important to making progress on AGI. David Deutsch, a physicist, philosopher and programmer, was my mentor and taught me a lot about philosophy and physics. He’s an award-winning pioneer of quantum computing, a Fellow of the Royal Society, and an author.

I’m a professional programmer with over a decade of work experience, but the software I work on isn’t related to AGI. I’ve read books about AI, watched talks, learned and coded some of the algorithms, talked with people in the field, etc.

Conclusion

Non-programmer animal rights advocates ought to be able to see that someone, some expert, should address the issue of whether humans are animals are differentiated by general intelligence. They should argue that animals have general intelligence (or argue that humans don’t have it) or explain some other sort of software/algorithm/code difference between animals and present day, non-AGI robots and software. If no one can do that and address the computational issues, the remaining option in favor of animal rights is to reject science.

I’m seeking thoughtful, competent written arguments addressing these issues. Blog posts are OK, not just academic material. I challenge anyone who favors animal rights to refer me to such literature in the comments below.