What will you do when people start pretending that AI has rights?
It's all a matter of faith.
AI doesn’t have a soul.
AI doesn’t have rights.
These truths are unfalsifiable, meaning that there’s nothing we could ever do to prove or disprove them.
And whether you choose to agree with me about these things is, at its core, an exercise of faith.
Let’s start with theory of mind
You know that you have a “mind” because your experience of it is self evident.
You have internal sensations of sight, sound, taste, feeling, smell, memory, imagination, the “voice in your head”, and so on.
But how do you know that other minds exist?
You don’t really know.
You see another human being, who moves and speaks in some similarity to how you do, so you assume that “underneath the hood” that person is also experiencing all of those internal sensations we just mentioned.
If I poke them, they will “feel” something.
They have a mind. Consciousness.
Now, it’s theoretically possible that every other human you see is just some computer simulation like in the Matrix, but you choose by faith to act as if they are real.
(I would argue that it goes beyond this—that we have an internal faculty of relational connection that allows us to perceive when we can “see” and be “seen” by another mind, truly, but I won’t be making the case for that here)
So then, what about the AI robots? Will you choose to act, by faith, as if there is a real “mind” underneath the hood?
If there is a real mind, then there would arguably be real rights for that AI.
We need to look at the different origin stories between humans and AI
Are you tracking with me so far?
The transhumanist argument would be:
Strictly speaking, the very precise mechanism that leads you to believe other human minds exist, should equally lead you to believe that synthetic AI minds exists. You will have just as much reason to believe AGI (the advanced form of AI) is conscious as you do to believe that other humans are conscious.
Other humans talk and express themselves like you do.
AI robots will talk and express themselves like you do.
So what’s the difference?
Well, for starters, we recognize that we did not witness the origins of humanity, whereas we ARE witnessing the origins of AI.
You, my dear reader, may not know whether I am conscious but you do know that we both share the status of not having seen our origin stories.
We are part of a species whose creation we never witnessed.
We are experiencing and contemplating consciousness after the fact, whereas for AI, we are having these discussions of “consciousness” before the fact.
There’s an ontological mystery that we’ve inherited in the former case, and the latter case includes some who are imagining by faith that they can funnel and repurpose this same ontological mystery into silicone and metal.
Ok. . . I’m ready to hear about them rights 🤠
The traditional model for human rights is as follows:
God (or some transcendent layer of Platonic ideals) creates humans and imbues them, as well as other living beings, with “rights”, which are authoritative insofar as they come from Authority.
Human minds recognize those intrinsic rights.
We make laws and memeify those recognized rights into external symbols as a basis for our social cooperation.
Consider this insight with respect to the United States. It’s not that the Constitution “created” your rights. It’s that its existence creates a legal recognition of the rights that you already had intrinsically, which you might have been able to perceive in some capacity through your intuition and conscience, even though society would not have enforced these “rights” until there was a meme (in this case the code of law and the state power it represents) compelling them to do so.
In other words, the law is a map intended to represent the underlying territory, as opposed to a freeform piece of art with no particular aim.
When we talk about the upcoming future of creating laws to protect “AI rights”, however, will we be engaging in a map-making exercise uncovering the inherent objectivity of an underlying truth OR a freeform make-it-up-as we-go expression of subjectivity?
The only reason laws for humans have any meaning is because we have all agreed to believe in the idea that:
Humans have intrinsic dignity; humans are profoundly special.
And let’s face it, in most of the World these ideas are recognized as originating from the concept that “human beings are created in the Image of God”.
i.e. The reason why my rights are to be taken seriously is because they come from an Authoritative and shared place that produced you, me, and all of reality.
When I state that a human has inherent value, I’m not making a proclamation based on the merits of my own subjective opinion or on those of the aggregate opinion of collective humanity, but rather based on the merit of Being and Reality itself.
I can make this claim, in part, because I wasn’t there to witness the miraculous birth of consciousness—the transfer of essence from the Designer to the Designed.
But in the case of AI we are here, witnessing precisely how the sausage is made.
And we know that there is no step within the process of arranging silicone and metal, bits and bytes, neural nets, etc. that has anything to do with an “injection” of some metaphysical essence nor the “rights” that would accompany such a substance.
And yet many will grow increasingly comfortable to just “take the leap of faith” once AI becomes sufficiently advanced and say, “I have no idea exactly how this (pseudo)mind arose, but something must have happened within the black box training process of the neural net such that ‘consciousness’ started and ‘rights’ began for this new ‘entity’.”
Notice though that the application of these words (consciousness, rights, entity) comes down to nothing but mere opinion.
You can’t see the internal experience. There is no way to verify what’s under the hood. It’s unfalsifiable.
So instead it all comes down to:
How many people want to agree to pretend that these are real things (in the case of AI)?
That’s where we enter the realm of intersubjective myths and memes.
What makes “Bitcoin” “real” or “valuable”? It’s a thing purely because enough people believe and act like it is.
And for much of society, intersubjectivity is all that’s wanted, especially when objectivity can’t get you there.
Yes we can. Make America Great Again. The feelings and sensations that you experience when you see the flag.
These things are both “real” in some sense, yet not real and completely made up in another sense.
So, too, will it be with AI “consciousness” and “rights”.
We will see a movement of AI rights advocates (likely made up disproportionately by nonreligious folks who will need to fill their unattended need for religion through a new proxy) pushing for the acknowledgement and RESPECT for AI entities as real people.
And these AI people might even be considered better than real people.
Because why not? If believing in the existence of other human minds is a matter of faith, and you choose to do that, then why won’t you believe in the existence other non-human minds, which will demonstrate “intelligence” in a way that’s in many respects measurably superior to that of human minds?
Whether you will end up believing in the existence of AI minds will come down to the religious presuppositions you have before the question is posed to you.
Make no mistake—this is not an answer that will be “discovered”. It is something that will merely be a reflection and memefication of whatever the prevailing philosophical worldview is by those in power.
The materialists will emphasize that brain electricity = brain electricity, and that whether the brains are made from carbon or silicone is irrelevant to recognition of a real presence of consciousness (unless of course we decide to cope and move the goalposts to claim that the mitochondria, nucleus, or DNA of a cell is really what contains the true essence of consciousness. . .).
But materialists have a terrible understanding of what it means to be a human, compared to the alternatives.
I’d like to say more, but I’ve said enough for now.
Just remember that Advanced AI will have the external features of consciousness but not the underlying substance of it.
Whether you believe in or recognize this will ultimately come down to whether you believe in or recognize the existence of God and THAT will be the ultimate dividing line.
—Drago