If you worry that suspending this belief would rob humans of consciousness (free will, etc.) and “lower” them to the level of “things”, note that you can instead “lift” those externals by granting them the relevant qualities, just expressed at sufficiently different/foreign scales so that human mind is unable to easily grasp the equivalence within its framework of perceived space-time.
- moral: equating inanimate processes and living processes means that you equate their same moral status.
- rationality : conscious processes behave differently in that they anticipate conditions and the behaviour of other processes. For example trees (at the bottom end of a scale of awareness) shed their leaves in the autumn in anticipation of frosts to come. The weather does not adapt to trees.
- utilitarian: physical processes don't remember you, humans will. If you strike an inanimate process, or burn it, or electrocute it and then return to it weeks later do not fear. If you do the same to a human, or a dog, or an elephant, I advise you to be cautious.
Again, if I equate moral status of human consciousness to that of inanimate things, it does not need to mean I am downgrading the former as opposed to upgrading the latter. I don’t really accept physicalism myself (but neither I do dualism).
I also think you have missed the part regarding wildly different or simply foreign scales. Weather adapting to trees may just be like you adapting to an earthworm while driving a car. Striking a stone, no more than a fly briefly landing on you. Bad analogies but I can’t think of a better one in the moment.
I suggest not to take it literally (stones are living, hahah) but analyze it philosophically. To a degree this may require accepting that the model of reality and three-dimensional space/time accessible to human mind may always be fragmentary and incomplete, optimized towards fitness and survival at human timescales.
At least (and I don’t know if you would call this an ego-driven argument), consciousness is something I can be sure definitely exists, considering that anything one could call “reality” is only accessible via consciousness (and obviously tainted and possibly constructed to an unknowable extent by it).
So, I understand the reluctance to accept a philosophical position that downgrades consciousness to something illusory, as physicalist positions tend to. (If that’s what the comment I responded to expressed, then I’m the same in that regard.)
I just think that it’s easy to miss the availability of non-dualist takes that don’t require such a downgrade, and unless I missed something (am yet to read it carefully) this article doesn’t seem to require it either, which would be refreshing.
As for the first point, it is actually insane. You don't start being cruel to animals because you are doing ontology.
I imagine many are in the same boat, if they admit it or not.
I also imagine that Wolfram isn't the best at compressing his ideas into a form that is easier to digest for those of us of more average intelligence.
1) We can & should differentiate between different classes of things like life, intelligent life and physical processes. This stops us from being cruel to things that experience suffering.
2) We may not be able to perceive or adequately describe classes of non computational processes that operate in our physical universe. This would not be a shock, after all, dogs can't do relativity and yet that does not exempt them from living in space time. Yet, we know that non computational processes do exist in theory. The claim "everything in the universe is a computer" is just that - a claim. It's up to people who believe it to show that every physical process that there is can be replicated using a computer... and that's not been done. To do it you need to enumerate the processes (which requires a competent theory of physics - not one that can't describe 98% of observed things), and you need to show that they can all be computed. We can't do the second thing because we can't even write down descriptions of intelligence and consciousness let alone compute them.
So, dangerous and unfounded. Dislike.