> I don't see it as a real problem. If a program or machine asserts that it perceives qualia, who are we to argue it's wrong?

Right now, we are in no position to argue it's wrong, because we have no accepted framework for understanding qualia.

That said, we can still make some simple assertions with confidence such as:

1: A one-line program which prints "I am afraid" does not experience fear qualia.

2: A human being which utters the words "I am afraid" may be experiencing fear qualia (and thus perhaps experiencing pain/suffering).

If you assert that the world is full of philosophical zombies rather than humans like yourself, you may not agree with assertion #2. But we build our ethical and legal frameworks around the idea that we aren't philosophical zombies, rather, that we have feelings and want to avoid suffering.

Once you start talking about more complicated programs, though, we don't know what the right assertions are. We don't have an understanding of what things can suffer and what things cannot, for starters. We generally agree that, say, dogs can suffer. That's why we have laws against animal abuse. But what about programs?

It is absolutely a real problem, because some day we will have to build laws and culture around how we treat AI. Whether or not an AI can suffer (ie. by experiencing qualia that can be considered undesirable) will likely affect how we treat that AI. If we have no way to answer "can this program suffer?", then we are setting ourselves up for regret.

"that's why we have laws against animal abuse"

I think there is a step or two missing in between. Abusing dogs isn't just as bad as abusing something that suffers. It's, e.g., doing something that has no value to society (unlike animals being mistreated in a feed lot), or it's something that sews unacceptable levels of aggression. It feels much more complicated than you make it seem.

I took it as necessary condition, not a sufficient condition. The other necessary conditions were omitted because they aren't important to the line of reasoning being presented.

If you try to find a logical basis for hypocritical laws, you're gonna have a bad time.

> If you assert that the world is full of philosophical zombies rather than humans like yourself

Hm? There is no objective test for whether I am a philosophical zombie or not.

Consciousness is subjective, so it's simply incoherent to ask whether something is conscious or a zombie.

Once an AI is advanced enough to make the question hard to answer, isn’t the odds that the AI will be advanced enough to simply decide the answer for us?

I imagine thane once someone manage to produce an AI with enough agency to seem sentient it will far exceed human capabilities.

I’d say the question is already potentially hard to answer.

We have deep learning systems that perceive and strategise. Who’s to say that AlphaGo doesn’t have some experience of playing out millions of games?

Please read Solaris.

Or talk to an ant.

There's no reason to expect to be able to understand something's ideas just because it's smarter than you.

Ned Block covers this in his paper on the Harder Problem of Consciousness. Other humans share a similar biology, so we have good enough justification to think they're conscious. It won't defeat solipsism, but it's enough to make a reasonable assumption.

Data or whatever AI/Android doesn't share our biology. And since we can't tell whether it's the functioning of our biology or the biology itself which provides us with consciousness, we lack any reasonable justification for assuming Data is conscious. And then he goes further into functional isomorphs at different levels and how that might or might not matter for Data, but we can't tell.

> Other humans share a similar biology, so we have good enough justification to think they're conscious.

That's the way it goes with these arguments: it always comes down to an appeal to what's reasonable or plausible (those who insist consciousness must be an algorithm are doing the same thing, at least until we have algorithms that seem to be making some progress on the hard problem.) One might equally say other humans share a similar physics. When Dennett said "we are all p-zombies", I suspect he was making the point that it would be highly tendentious to take the position that anything both behaving and functioning physically in the manner of a human would not be conscious, except for humans themselves.

I see a lot of resemblance in biology between myself and cats, does that mean that cats have qualia? I infer they dream from their twitches as they sleep.

How about mice? Lizards? Fish? Insects? Nematodes? At what point do qualia stop occurring? I see a more or less continuous decline in similarity. I don't see any justification for a cut-off.

I don't think data is conscious. I suspect consciousness might be a side-effect physical computation. I don't believe there's any magic to the human brain's inputs and outputs which cannot be computed, and thus display the appearance of consciousness. In fact I see the Turing test as a thought experiment more than any actual test, a way of removing the appearance of a human body from the task of evaluating an artificial intelligence as a thinking, conscious being. If it quacks like a duck, a rose by any other name, etc.

In fact I'm not entirely convinced that the Western conception of consciousness isn't a learned cultural artifact, that there aren't people who have a more expansive notion of self which includes close family, for example. Have you ever suffered watching a relative hurt themselves? Ever had false memories of injury from childhood which you found out later happened to someone else?

We have all discussed this in your absence, and we have decided that only you are a zombie.