I tend to think intelligence (or consciousness or sentience) comes from sensorimotor interactions. So the moral status of a gold
fish (or even better an RNA protocell) is higher than that of super-intelligence ... depending, of course, on what we mean by
"super". If it means "other dimensions" or even "meta", then *maybe* it has higher status. But if
it means "higher order" or "further derived", then it has lower moral status than the *source* material from
which it's derived.
So I'd consider a creature with a high dimensional sensorimotor surface ... what? an octopus maybe? ... to
have higher moral status than, say, a human with it's paltry 5± senses. Of course, this is fraught because if
we decompose something like "smell" or "touch", it gets more complex than a single
dimension, with a variety of different receptors for each "sense".
Whatever, though. My intention is to call out the difference between many ways
of interacting with the world versus sophisticated inference from a few ways of
interacting with the world. So Claude/Clawd don't cut the mustard ... yet. What
is the real difference between a rich type system with low throughput and a
simple type system with high throughput? To boot, it's conceivable that
creatures with intense/dense inferential organs are *prevented* from being in
tune with the world. I did a bit of a deep dive the other day on the ~25-33% of
people who experience significant adverse reactions to meditative and
mindfulness practice (~6-14% long-lasting). Gazing at one's belly button isn't
healthy for everyone.
Of course, services like Claude and ChatGPT aren't merely LLMs. They have tools they can reach out
to. But those tools are *also* derived, one might say of very (!) high order. I mean, Perplexity,
Consensus, Asta, et al reach for sources relatively close to The World because they're classed as
"scientific publications". But when Copilot reaches out to sites like humanreligions.info
or religionunplugged.com, that's not so much interacting with The World as it's interacting with
delusional fantasies, even if "agentic".
[±] perhaps including things like proprio- or intero-.
On 12/16/25 8:45 AM, Marcus Daniels wrote:
What the heck is "moral status"? If superintelligence doesn't get moral
status, then I think nothing will deserve moral status.
-----Original Message-----
From: Friam <[email protected]> On Behalf Of glen
Sent: Tuesday, December 16, 2025 8:11 AM
To: [email protected]
Subject: [FRIAM] bigly
https://www.404media.co/anthropic-exec-forces-ai-chatbot-on-gay-discord-community-members-flee/
Jason Clinton, Anthropic’s Deputy Chief Information Security Officer (CISO)
https://www.linkedin.com/in/jason-d-clinton/
Jason Clinton wrote 🙄:
It’s quite a bit more complicated than you’d think: we don’t know what
consciousness or sentience is, it’s called the hard problem of
consciousness for a reason, [...]
We have published research showing that the models have started
growing neuron clusters that are highly similar to humans and that
they experience something like anxiety and fear. The moral status
might be something like the moral status of, say, a goldfish, but they
do indeed have latent wants and desires, [...]
I'm not posting to talk about how silly it is to ascribe consciousness to an AI bot. Nor am I here to rant, again,
about egocentric preemptive registration. What irritates me about this is the word "highly". Maybe it's just
me. But for a decade or so, we've been pelted all day every day with sh¡t Trump and his sycophants say. And either they
*are* people with impoverished vocabularies; or they know they're speaking to such. They tend to intensify
"weak" words like "similar". Because they're egoist, they *must* intensify what they're saying. And
because they don't have access to better words, they have to intensify the few words they do have, e.g. "highly
similar".
Were I Jason, I hope I could have had the self-awareness to eliminate "highly" and simply write
"similar". But a better option is to use stronger words
<https://www.cjr.org/language_corner/very-trump-tweet-intensifier.php>. As with everything about
the TACO President, the mask he chooses tells us something about what's under that mask. He pretends at
strength because he's inherently weak.
Of course, maybe it's my pet peeve because I'm also guilty of it? .... No! Stop it! "I got
it, I got it! I know your damn words, alright?"
<https://youtu.be/zgvXtexdgAM?si=G5-3-epw235wuY7n>
--
¡sıɹƎ ןıɐH ⊥ ɐןןǝdoɹ ǝ uǝןƃ
ὅτε oi μὲν ἄλλοι κύνες τοὺς ἐχϑροὺς δάκνουσιν, ἐγὰ δὲ τοὺς φίλους, ἵνα σώσω.
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