Citation

Author Website

https://wanja-wiese.de/

Thread

Jonathan Birch, Précis of The Edge of Sentience: Risk and Precaution in Humans, Other Animals, and AI

Abstract

I critically examine Jonathan Birch’s account of how brain emulations might create artificial sentience candidates, arguing that his account risks collapsing into a behaviourist account, unless the specific computational processes realised by such emulations are carefully considered. Drawing on examples from computational neuroscience, I show that similar behaviours can arise from vastly different computational processes, thereby undermining the suggestion to focus on behaviourial profiles to determine whether a brain emulation of a sentience candidate is itself a sentience candidate.

Creative Commons License

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

Author Biography

Wanja Wiese is a philosopher at the Institute for Science and Ethics at the University of Bonn, Germany. His research focuses on philosophy of AI and consciousness. He is co-founder and co-editor-in-chief of Philosophy and the Mind Sciences  Website

DOI

10.51291/2377-7478.1957