Limits of Understanding Pt. 3
Wednesday, November 27
From Jonathan Birch’s The Edge of Sentience:
In the woods near my home a tiny fly, about the size of Drosophila, landed on the middle finger of my left hand. I usually blow flies away. This time, this book weighing on my mind, I let the fly sit there. Like the octopus in My Octopus Teacher, the fly seemed oddly curious about my skin, exploring the strange textures and odours, raising and lowering its limbs. I walked with them for twenty minutes or so.
The longer you watch a fly, the easier it becomes to see them for what they are: an exploratory, unpredictable, inscrutable creature with a complex brain. A false perception of the fly as a nondescript nuisance gives way to something more accurate, more attuned to reality. You think at first that a being of that size could not be as complex or interesting as a dog or an octopus. Looking closely makes you think again.
Much of Birch’s book is about how we can make policy decisions affecting entities — fetuses, animals, and even artificial intelligence — that may or may not be conscious, now and in the future.
How do we know that anything else can think? We don’t have direct insight into anyone’s consciousness but our own. We assume other humans have internal experiences more or less like our own, not just because they report having such experiences, but simply by virtue of their similarity to us (hence why we also attribute conscious experiences to babies, or to adults without the capacity for language).
So what do we do when we encounter beings dissimilar from us — like the Drosophila? Birch suggests a precautionary framework. Under serious uncertainty of doing grave harm, we should err on the side of caution and restraint.
But finding those cases of uncertainty requires looking closely, and dissimilarity should open more questions than it closes.