It is hard to have this conversation on hacker news.

The format works well for general discussion, but this is a particularly subtle topic - its hard to make conversational progress before several essays back and forth to pin down a set of agreed terminology.

This is something I'm struggling with here. I don't want to get bogged down in a debate on good semantics, but without clarification its hard to have any meaningful discussion. Sometimes you need to spend some time discussing semantics, in order to move past them.

I need a word to describe the sort of higher level awareness that we humans have in and of ourselves, that makes it not ok to 'switch off' another human. Normally, I'd say sapience, after 'wisdom' - but you are clearly using that in a different meaning, so I'll go with 'personhood', without limiting that necessarily to homo sapiens.

While we still know relatively little about personhood, I would be happier to use hopes and fears as a defining criteria, over pleasure and pain.

Pleasure and pain are very low-level sensory phenomena.
Very simple life can feel pleasure and pain - pain particularly; to my mind, they are neither necessary, nor sufficient, criteria for personhood.

Hopes are fears are, I think, the product of a much higher level reasoning process.
For a start, they are not merely short term and reactive; they pre-suppose some model of the future. Further, I think they generally necessitate a model of self, and an awareness of self in that future.

That makes them very different criteria, in general.

If you were arguing that 'subjective experiences' were necessary for personhood, it'd have been better to state that explicitly.

The post you were responding, when you mentioned pleasure and pain, said that 'humanity was fundamentally a function of our minds'.
I agree with that post.

If you require pleasure and pain - which clearly require some level of situatedness in a sensory apparatus which can communicate these sensations - for your definition of personhood, then I can see how you would argue against a machine 'simulating' personhood.

However, with hopes and fears, no such situatedness is required. I see no reason why a machine couldn't potentially simulate/execute a program/consciousness that had hopes and fears, even without a body, or conventional sensory input.

I see no reason why a simulated/executed (it is very important to realise that these two verbs have the same effective result in this context) program couldn't have subjective experience.

>If you believe that humanity amounts to more than merely electrical signals and other physical phenomena (ie you're not a reductionist) then I'm surprised it's my side of the argument you're disagreeing with.

So many difficult (loaded?) words there: 'amounts', 'merely', 'reductionist', 'side'.

I believe humanity amounts to more than merely electrical signals, in the same way I believe the mona lisa 'amounts' to more than 'merely' a collection of oils on a poplar.

Join the technological revolution: its not the atoms that are important - its the bits.
The pattern things are in is much more important than the things themselves.
A quicksort algorithm running on vaccum tubes, or transistors, or water pipes, or CPU simulated in minecraft, or rocks in an XKCD desert, is still a quicksort algorithm.

Its not 'merely' a collection of electrical signals. Its become more than that, because the electrical signals are arranged in a certain pattern. But its still fully explainable in terms of electrical signals.

>(ie you're not a reductionist)
I do believe our minds are defined and explained (in theory) by physical phenomena, like everything else in the universe.

I'm not a supernaturalist.
How about you?