Identical objects — hypericin

And how do you decide which two objects are identical?

Objects which are 99.99999% identical are overwhelmingly likely to share their properties. — hypericin

What property corresponds to what % loss of identicalness?

Take a computer which is on and a computer which is off. Are they similar or dissimilar?

What about a computer which is on but large, and a computer which is on but small. Are they more or less dissimilar than the pair which were on/off?

Is a lawnmower more like a scythe than a car because they both cut grass, or more like a car than a scythe because they both have engines?

To my view our discussion has transitioned into the realm of the dishonest — ZzzoneiroCosm

Uh huh, so I wasn't wrong the first time then.

anyone who chooses to deploy solipsism to defend his position has ceased to do serious philosophy. — ZzzoneiroCosm

As far as I can tell, you're the only one who has even mentioned solipsism.

You know the Other is sentient.

And you're certain of it. — ZzzoneiroCosm

So your argument has deteriorated into "I'm right therefore any contrary position must be merely ludic"...

It takes a rare ego to be so convinced of one's own acumen that one believes all contrary positions to be lies.

At risk of being insulted again... — Wayfarer

I engaged in good faith in a perfectly reasonable line of enquiry in our earlier conversation which you ignored. To me, ignoring someone who is engaged in a perfectly reasonable conversation is a far greater insult than a bit of robust language. My colleagues and I often exchange some robust language, yet I wouldn't dream of just walking out of the room and ignoring them. We each have our own notion of civility I suppose...

I would aver that what idealism calls into question is the mind independent nature of matter. — Wayfarer

Right. A completely different subject then. You seem to draw in this notion of the mind affecting matter without either reference or forward. We were talking about the cause of mental events (matter affecting minds). If you have an argument for mind affecting matter, I'd be fascinated to hear it.

Other humans are very likely sentient, being very like us. — hypericin

This is just not true. You have no data at all on which to assess probability. Unless you know what property of our brains causes sentience, you don't know what properties you are looking for commonality over. You're just assuming that those properties are visible, biological features, but that assumption begs the question.

I understand that humans are sentient beings situated in the world, and that sense data originate with objects (and other subjects) in that world. — Wayfarer

So your idealism is not incompatible with materialism then. You could have just said so right at the beginning.

Probably a bit too technical to go into. — Wayfarer

Pathetic.

You ignore my line of argument that idealism (as you present it) doesn't oppose materialism, then you respond to @Banno making much the same point with a hand-waiving "too technical". It's not 'too technical' at all.

The materialist answer is "material matter". The brain constructs it's reality out of the material universe. Meaning that matter is the cause of all mental events.

Your answer is ....? "it's too technical"?

I think it can be supported with reference to science. — Wayfarer

Go on then. Reference a single paper in neuroscience which has sensory neurons triggered by anything other than physical forces.

All that matters is that they are overwhelmingly similar. — hypericin

Similar in what way? Because I could make the argument that a sophisticated AI was more similar in function to my brain than, say, the brain of an infant (I wouldn't personally make such an argument, I don't know enough about AI do so, but it's perfectly possible it might one day be the case). I could say a well-trained AI was more similar in content to my brain that that of an infant. I could say an AI was more similar to my brain in language ability than that of an infant.

You're picking some properties above others by which to measure your idea of 'similarity', but the properties you're choosing are cherry-picked to give the answer you've already decided on.

The subject of this OP is the news article presented therein, i.e. Lemoine's claims vs. Google's counterclaims regarding LaMDA's sentience and which are more credible. — Baden

The point being made is that claims to credibility are inherently moral claims. The moral cost of being wrong needs to be taken account of. Exactly the same as the decision to remove life-support has a moral element to it, it's not just a medical decision about the likelihood of recovery. Claims to sentience have to be on some grounds, the choice of those grounds will include some and exclude others from moral worth. So choosing grounds is an ethical question.

Sentience is a function of the brain. Similar organisms have similar brain function. Therefore brain functions exhibited by one organism likely occur in similar organisms. — hypericin

Again, you're making ungrounded assumptions about the properties which count as 'similar'. A similar colour? A similar weight?

What level of 'similarity' to a brain do you require and what properties of a brain need to be matched?

But I'm talking about the belief, or faith, that acting in a particular way is worth the effort.
It's this belief or faith that can be eroded. — baker

Yes. I think that process of erosion is more in one's control than is immediately apparent perhaps. One can lose faith st every setback, or one can retain it despite failures.

No, I'm not talking about one's first thoughts, I'm talking about mental states that cannot be brought about deliberately. — baker

Yeah, I'm disputing the existence of those states. I'm saying that such states only appear to be impossible to bring about because we erroneously assume that the state they are intended to replace (our first thoughts) is arrived by some more 'natural' process. It isn't.

If one is, say, sad, that state of sadness is a constructed narrative to explain the sea of interocepted prior states being experienced. Other narratives are equally valid and perfectly possible to believe.

Like any narrative, there are limits, it has to work (predictions made using it have to turn out), but there are multiple narratives which work no better or worse than each other. We're free to choose between them.

That's not a very good reason to make such an extraordinary claim. — ZzzoneiroCosm

I'm not claiming it's good. I'm claiming there's no better.

sentience can never be proven. — ZzzoneiroCosm

Providing proofs and 'proving' are not the same thing. For clarity we could say 'evidence'.

I accept that other human beings are sentient because I'm sentient and they look and behave like I do. — ZzzoneiroCosm

Yep. That's exactly the claim Lemione is making. Thst LaMDA looks and behaves sufficiently like him. Lemione's threshold for sufficiency is obviously lower than yours. Have you any justification for your particular threshold of similarity?

Biologically, we're of the same species. — ZzzoneiroCosm

Yes. You keep repeating this claim but without any support whatsoever. On what grounds is your biological similarity key? Why not your similarity of height, or weight, or density, or number of limbs... You've not given any reason why species matters. All you've said is the because you're sentient, you presume other thing like you are too. A bookcase is like you (it's about the same height), more so thsn a baby (completely different height and build). An adult chimpanzee is arguably more like you than an neonatal human, it's more similar in size and shape.

I can never prove my fellow human beings are sentient. — ZzzoneiroCosm

Yes. We can take that as given. We can't prove the sun will rise tomorrow either. We can't prove all sorts of things. It doesn't prevent us from assessing the quality of various arguments.

Even if the man is completely sane, he's only one man. No one else has made his claim and many of his colleagues have claimed the opposite. — ZzzoneiroCosm

As above...

"It seems sentient."

It's the very highest proof possible for sentience since there are no other agreed measures. — Isaac

At any rate, my most current formulation is:

Anyone claiming a machine might be sentient - an extraordinary claim - bears the burden of proof. — ZzzoneiroCosm


They should have a very, very, very good reason for making this claim. — ZzzoneiroCosm

"It seems sentient."

It's the very highest proof possible for sentience since there are no other agreed measures.

To my knowledge one person has possibly* made this claim. His psychological history is unknown.


*It may be a promotional stunt. — ZzzoneiroCosm

Yeah, it may be. And if it is, or he's gone mad, or is lying, or was on drugs or whatever, then any of those situations would constitute evidence that LaMDA is not sentient. But those are not the pieces of evidence you've provided. You've assumed he must be one of those things because you've already concluded LaMDA cannot be sentient. It's that conclusion I'm taking issue with.

Isn't materialism what empiricism is defined by? — Jackson

I don't think so. The SEP gives us...

The main characteristic of empiricism, however, is that it endorses a version of the following claim for some subject area:

The Empiricism Thesis: We have no source of knowledge in S or for the concepts we use in S other than experience.

So experience, not necessarily matter, defines empiricism. That we experience matter (ie all of our experiences thus far are directly attributable to matter) is empirical evidence for materialism. If we had experiences that were unaffected by matter (I experience a nice day out despite having had my brain completely removed and being locked in a windowless box) then we'd have direct empirical evidence against materialism.

I've had this experience, and it left me disheartened. My trust in finding support through stories has been eroded. — baker

My question was about how you'd know. I mean, it's not as if Frodo had a party throughout the book. His journey was, if I recall correctly, pretty much one trial after another without let up even up to the last chapter and then he had to leave anyway. I don't see how someone in mid-life could possibly say "well, I tried it and it hasn't worked".

After that, only a deliberate taking up of this approach remains. Like with so many things, when doing something deliberately, it loses its power somehow. Like if you deliberately try to fall asleep, you can't; if you deliberately try to be "more spontaneous", you're even more uptight.

I think that the trust in stories that you're talking about is what is sometimes termed "states that are essentially by-products". Ie. they cannot be achieved deliberately. — baker

Yes, I sympathise with that, it is difficult to get out of the idea that one's first thoughts are somehow more authentic. But there really is no reason to think they are. They just happened to have arrived first. There's nothing special about them.

No. But neither does LaMDA. — ZzzoneiroCosm

Not to you. To Lemione it does. That's the point. You're talking about your personal judgement of an ineffable factor and simply declaring that to be the appropriate global view.

Incidentally, a schizophrenic can experience a kind of pan-sentience. The objects are watching me. The mind is capable of experiencing or conceiving of the world as pan-sentient. — ZzzoneiroCosm

Indeed. One of the reason we know something's wrong with them. So I'll ask again, with more clarity...has anyone whose judgement you otherwise trust to be sane considered your sofa sentient?

The answer is obviously no. So there's absolutely no 'slippery slope' argument to be made here. There's no problem with where we stop. No-one (sane) considers rocks sentient. People (intelligent, sane ones) consider certain instances of AI sentient. You arbitrarily deciding that anything without DNA can't be doesn't even approach a sensible counterargument.

Again, sentience is the state of having feelings/awareness. It is not the outputting of linguistically coherent responses to some input. — Baden

It's not the nature of the state, it's the means of testing it that's in question here.

let's realize how low a bar it is to consider appropriate outputs in mostly gramatically correct forms of language to some linguistic inputs (except challenging ones) to be evidence of feelings. — Baden

OK, that sounds like a good approach. So what's the 'higher bar' test you propose?

The ability to produce (a fascimile of) language is neither a necessary nor sufficient condition of sentience nor, without some justificatory framework, is it even any evidence thereof. — Baden

No, I agree, but what matters with AI is not the ability to produce language but the speculation about the means by which it is done. An mp3 player on shuffle could produce language responses. It's not an AI. What makes AI different is not the output but the method by which that output is produced.

___

To be clear, I don't have an opinion on whether LaMDA is sentient, I've not spent any time with it. The argument is that is otherwise intelligent and sane people think it is sentient, countering their view by saying "it can't be, it's made of wires" is not only weak but has precisely the same pattern as previous denials of moral worth. You say "it must be biological" as if that were obvious, but the exact same "obviousness" was applied in the past to other criteria. Criteria which previously excluded slaves, children, the mentally ill...

It's ought not be about criteria at all. The moment we start tempering our compassion with a set of arbitrary, socially convenient, criteria for when it is and is not required be applied we become more inhuman than the AIs we're trying to distance ourselves from.

But you've already agreed in respect of the issue at hand that there can be no evidence for materialist theories of mind: — Wayfarer

I don't believe I said anything about a lack of evidence, only a lack of proof, the evidence does not compel us to choose. What we take to be evidence is about what, for us, is convincing. There is empirical evidence for materialism. The failure to yet discover any mechanism other than those of materialism is one.

But that aside, your comment seemed to pertain to empirical claims in general...

someone who makes constant appeals to empiricism — Wayfarer

I answered in kind. Claims to empiricism are entirely appropriate, empirical evidence is good, convincing evidence. It should be appealed to as often as possible. The fact that some questions lack sufficient empirical evidence to answer them does nothing to undermine the usefulness of empirical evidence where it exists.

I sometimes wonder if idealism's great strength is its ineffability and its contrast to the materialist model which has atrophied over time and is rather easily undermined by philosophers. — Tom Storm

It seems to me that the most common argument for various forms of idealism goes something like "materialism is flawed, therefore this..."

The flaws in materialism are not, however, evidence in favour of any old alternative.

There’s a certain duplicity here, coming from someone who makes constant appeals to empiricism. — Wayfarer

Again, appeals to empiricism are perfectly warranted. It's a very convincing form of evidence. Evidence and theory are, however, two very different things. The materialist model is a theory. It has nothing whatsoever to do with the acceptability or otherwise of certain types of evidence.

If someone says "I can walk through walls" I can guarantee you the first response of 99.99% of the planet will be "show me!". It will not be "does it phenomenologically seem that way to you?"

Proofs are all about convincing, nothing more. Empirical evidence is very convincing.

'Well, we'll never really know how it works, but even so, we must believe it.' — Wayfarer

Just wanted to add some clarity to my earlier response to this.

If we were speculating as to the contents of a sealed box, it's right to say that we can't possibly know what's in it. I claim it's a rock "there used to be a rock on the same table this box is on, the box is about the right size...". We still can't know.

If you say "I think the box contains a unicorn", that doesn't become an equally acceptable theory just because we can't know what's in the box.

I think we agree on this much.

So all I'm saying is that the materialist model of mental activity is of the former category of theory. It's a perfectly reasonable theory, it just can't ever be shown to be the case because we must rely on that very mental activity to process any evidence we might produce. We can't escape that particular recursion, so we can't 'look in the box'. But the fact that we can't provide proofs doesn't preclude its reasonableness as a model. Nor, most importantly, does it raise any alternative model to a more reasonable status.

So how is a causal explanation that can't be understood anything other than an article of faith? 'Well, we'll never really know how it works, but even so, we must believe it.' It's like a Catholic talking about transubstantiation. — Wayfarer

Yes. That's right. It's just a model I find most convincing, that's all. Just like Catholics and God.

it doesn't follow that reason itself is subject to the same criticism because reason is the court of appeal for any and all claims. — Wayfarer

That sounds to me like it exactly following. Saying that "reason is the court of appeal for any and all claims" is something you have derived by reason.

Why can intentionality no be constituted of neurons and exchanges of ions across synapses? Why must it be constituted of something else? — Isaac


For the reasons we have been discussing. — Wayfarer

I haven't picked up on any. What exactly prevents the feeling we call 'intending' being made from neural activity?

Except for all the thousands of issues for which there is a range of different interpretations, huge controversies raging, threatened paradigms, etc etc. — Wayfarer

Yes, but those are disagreements in science. Science and empirical proofs are not the same thing. Science uses empirical proofs, but it also uses a huge dose of reasoning, metaphysical assumptions, speculation... It's generally those over which people disagree. I very rarely find if I say "the scan shows activity in the left ventral region" someone looking at the same scan will say "no it doesn't". If we disagree, it will be on my theoretical assumptions, not the actual evidence they make use of.

What religious belief? Haven't said anything about religion in this entire thread. — Wayfarer

It was a descriptive term, not an ascriptive one. Belief in exceptionalism of humans originates from religion, ie it is a religious belief. It doesn't mean you have to ascribe to that religion in order to believe it, it's just a description of who 'owns copyright' on that type of belief, so to speak. Pre-religious tribes (pre- modern religion) are almost universally animistic.

which exhibit conscious activity — Wayfarer

And what is 'conscious activity'?

there's no reason to believe that there is anything to prove — Wayfarer

Lemione is giving us a reason. You dismiss it as most likely a hoax, then say that there no reasons to consider whether AI is conscious. Of course there are no reasons, you dismiss them as they arise.

I recall a thread of your some time back where your were imploring us to take people at their word when they were talking about past lives - "I spoken to him at length and he seems to know things he couldn't possibly know..." - and asking us to take it as possible evidence for past lives, ie to not dismiss it out of hand just because it doesn't fit in our physicalist world-view. Yet here your are doing exactly that. Refusing to take "She seems conscious to me..." as a reason to consider that position.

On the other hand: there is no other approach to the subjective short of assuming all things - viruses, amoebae, flowers, rocks, machines, sofas, tables - are sentient — ZzzoneiroCosm

Does your sofa seem sentient? Has anyone interacting with it come away with the impression that it's sentient?

Of course there's another approach. Assume anything which seems sentient, is sentient. since we cannot come up with any objective measure of what is sentient, the only reason we have anything to describe at all is that some things seem sentient. It's you and @Wayfarer who want to add some religious belief that there's a new category of thing which seems sentient but 'really' isn't. Up until now we've been getting along perfectly well just taking it that anything which seems sentient probably is. We haven't previously gone around checking for 'homeostasis' or 'functional autonomy', the word 'sentient' found it's use entirely based on things which seemed to possess that characteristic.

You're now trying to 'reverse engineer' that definition and make it describe something which excludes AI, but the criteria you're introducing were never the criteria applied to the use of the word 'sentient' in the first place, it was invoked entirely to describe things which seemed a certain way.

To say that the cause of mental events - the cause of thought or of a chain of reasoned inference - can be understood in molecular terms, undermines the efficacy of reason. — Wayfarer

I agree. But you've switched again from saying mental events are caused by physical matter to saying mental events can be understood that way. It's perfectly possible to believe that mental events are caused entirely by physical matter and yet also believe that they will never be understood that way. This is, in fact, my personal position.

The only form that genuine reasoning can take consists in seeing the validity of the arguments, in virtue of what they say. As soon as one tries to step outside of such thoughts (e.g. by describing them in terms of molecular properties) one loses contact with their true content. And one cannot be outside and inside them at the same time: If one thinks in logic, one cannot simultaneously regard those thoughts as mere psychological dispositions (or neurophysical activities), however caused or however biologically grounded. If one decides that some of one's psychological dispositions are, as a contingent matter of fact, reliable methods of reaching the truth (as one may with perception, for example), then in doing so one must rely on other thoughts that one actually thinks, without regarding them as mere dispositions. One cannot embed all one's reasoning in a psychological theory, including the reasonings that have led to that psychological theory. The epistemological buck must stop somewhere. — Wayfarer

If I were to claim "It is true that my thoughts are just neural states" then I agree with the analysis. I cannot say such a thing without recursion because the means by which I've determined it to be true must itself be nothing but a set of neural states and there's no reason to believe they yield 'truth'. In fact, the very concept of 'truth' would be meaningless since a 'true' state of affairs would just be a state of affairs which elicited a particular neural state (the state of something seeming to be true).

But his recursion affects reason no less. If I say that my thoughts are just logical relations, I must have used a logical relation to arrive at that conclusion and it is the logical relation of facts which lead me to believe it is true. But if 'truth' is just those facts which seem to result from a logical relation, then I've no ground on which to claim that logical relations lead to truth. The argument is no less self-immunised.

Whatever model we have of 'what thoughts really are' it will itself be a thought. Doesn't matter what the model is. Recursion is built in.

When I test perception, I look at the difference between maybe some illusion I've set up and the image the subject reports, but I'm acutely aware that if I'm using an experiment to determine that perception is flawed, then I must accept the inherent problem that I'm using my perception to determine the results. Yet we know perception is flawed. Illusions exist. We can resolve that recursion quite adequately for our needs by coming to a collective decision about what is real (and hence what is an illusion).

Likewise with thought. I cannot use my own thought alone to determine the nature of thought, but collectively we can come to an agreement about what thought is sufficient to identify when something isn't one. That agreement might be 'logical relation', or it might be 'neural state'. It doesn't matter, as long as we agree for our purposes.

The problem is, if you say that what the mind is nothing but the activities of neurons and exchanges of ions across synapses, then you're excluding intentionality from the picture — Wayfarer

Why? Why can intentionality no be constituted of neurons and exchanges of ions across synapses? Why must it be constituted of something else?

you regard other kinds of explanations as speculative and unprovable — Wayfarer

Well, yes. I've yet to be presented with a meas of proving them that works. It's not that I hold empirical proof as being fundamentally better, there's no metaphysical property that empirical proof possess that makes them better. It's just that they work. When I show you an empirical proof, you take it to be proof, you agree. As does virtually everyone. They work as proofs only because they convince people. No other reason. Non-empirical 'proofs' do not work. You show them to me and I am unconvinced. Others are also unconvinced. They don't work.

You don’t just understand her at the reductive level of neural or molecular interaction in causal terms. You also understand her molar behavior in such terms(social and bodily influences). — Joshs

Indeed. What I'm trying to unpick is why the claim that the causes of our mental events are material must have any bearing whatsoever on how we treat that causal relationship epistemologically. We could be thoroughgoing materialists about the causes of mental events yet believe anything about their epistemology from a belief in complete one-to-one reductionism to a belief that the whole thing will remain a complete mystery forever.

Personally, I don't think we'll ever have a one-to-one model of how matter causes mental events. I think the relationship is too complex and probably varies between individuals. None of that perennial uncertainty causes me to doubt that material physics directly causes all mental events. It just means we'll just never know the exact nature of that relationship.

if your wife develops depression do you recommend a cognitive therapist who will help her to change her ‘unrealistic’ thinking, a classic Freudian who would examine her adjustment to the ‘real world’, or would you choose a client-centered therapist who would encourage her potential to create new realities? — Joshs

I'm not sure where this line of questioning is going, but for furtherance, I'm a proponent of person-centred therapy, yes.

But what is dependency dependent upon, if not the primary? — Wayfarer

'Primary' as in most fundamental is a different meaning to 'primary' as in most important. We're talking here about the causes of our mental events. Materialism is saying that those causes are material. Unless idealism is saying that those causes are not material, then it is not saying anything incompatible with materialism. One might well be of the opinion that we cannot directly 'know' those causes. One might be of the opinion that those causes are completely irrelevant and that the only subject is our mental representations. Neither of those two positions are about what those causes are, hence neither are incompatible with materialism.

'Materialism, also called physicalism, in philosophy, the view that all facts (including facts about the human mind and will and the course of human history) are causally dependent upon physical processes, or reducible to them'. — Wayfarer

How does what they are causally dependant on, or what they reduce to have any bearing on how fundamental or important they are? My wife is made of nothing but molecules. That doesn't have any bearing on how important she is.

he can't claim that the mind simply doesn't exist, but he does claim it can be wholly understood in terms of unconscious neural processes, something which he calls 'unconscious competence'. — Wayfarer

Uh huh. So a claim against Dennett would require that the mind cannot ever be understood in terms of neural processes. Again, this seems to be a claim about epistemology, not ontology. What causes mental events is distinct from whether we can ever relate those causes to their effects.

You can't necessarily prove its validity to anyone else — Wayfarer

Exactly.

Contrary to the image you may have of me, I have no issue with the limits of empirical research in explaining human mental events. What I take issue with is the idea that some other form of enquiry would do any better.

"Thought crime" as a prohibition has a very long history of failure and pathologization in countless societies. — 180 Proof

Agreed. Whether or not we encourage/allow facilities to reduce/increase desensitisation is, I think, a far cry from thought crimes though.

it would, in truth, be horrific to adjudicate moral reasoning to a bureaucratic establishment dedicated to producing knowledge, issuing certificates of analysis on each robot, alien, or person that they qualify. — Moliere

Exactly. Too often have we erred in this respect (slavery, animal cruelty, child abuse, treatment of the mentally retarded...) to trust any bureaucracy with this kind of judgement. It seems more likely than not that whatever decision we make about the moral worth of some entity, we'll be horrified 100 years later that we ever thought that way.

The Zong was a slave ship transporting slaves from Africa. It ran out of water, and so to save what rations were left, the slaves were thrown overboard, still chained. In litigation, the Judge, Lord Mansfield said he

...had no doubt that the Case of Slaves was the same as if Horses had been thrown over board

I think the key factor in cases like slavery is that we do not start from a limited group of 'moral subjects' and gradually expand it. We start with everything that seems like a moral subject included and we gradually reduce it.

We eliminate, from the group of moral subjects, on the basis of a range of factors, some reasonable (unplugging the AI), some unreasonable (deciding slaves are like horses). Even when the grounds are reasonable, such decisions shouldn't be easy. They should come with discomfort, lest we're unfettered next time we decide some element of humanity is as dispensable as a horse.

I think it would be only too easy to induce ataraxia by producing two counter-papers — ZzzoneiroCosm

It would. Although we'd normally then go on to discuss the relative merits and problems with those papers, but I understand philosophy is different...

I think the minds of children should be protected from simulations of violence. And possibly some set of adult minds. But on minds like mine it has no detrimental effect. — ZzzoneiroCosm

Possibly. So we could then ask the question of how we ought act in the face of such uncertainty. Is it worth the risk? What are the costs either way? That kind of analysis can be done, no?

materialism claims that matter, or matter-energy, or whatever it turns out to be, has a kind of mind-independent or inherent reality which is the source or ground of everything that we see and know, whereas idealism stresses the primacy of mind or experience. — Wayfarer

But there's no 'whereas' there. There's nothing contrary about claiming the 'primacy' of the mind over the 'independence' of the source of what we know. Primacy and dependence are, again, two different properties.

If materialism claims matter has a mind-independent reality, then the opposing claim is that matter has no mind-independent reality. Anything less is simply an additional claim, not an opposing one. One might be a staunch materialist and still believe in the primacy of mind or experience.

Dennett's critics claim that there's no way to reproduce the reality of first-person experience in third-person terms. — Wayfarer

Right. But in neither case is it 'forgotten' that the mind of this 'third-person' is a mind. The debate is over whether one mind can adequately describe another. Nothing there forgets minds are involved.

It has different standards of evidence. — Wayfarer

It does. But how are you linking standards of evidence to the ability of a mind to comprehend itself? Your objection to Dennett wasn't with his standard of evidence, it was with the impossibility of reproducing the first-person experience from a third party perspective. That impossibility applies to any conclusions Husserl might reach as it does conclusions a neuroscientist might reach, standards of evidence notwithstanding.

Here are some papers you might be interested in

Short Term Exposure to a Violent Video Game Induces Changes in Frontolimbic Circuitry in Adolescents

This is your brain on violent video games: Neural desensitization to violence predicts increased aggression following violent video game exposure

a virtual simulation of distress - that is to say, twice-removed from actual distress. The human mind is able to cope with, manage, such nuances and remain completely healthy. — ZzzoneiroCosm

That's the conclusion, not the evidence.

I think the eventual availability of high-fidelity graphic-emotive VR simulators of rape, torture & murder (plus offline prescription medications, etc) will greatly reduce the incidents of victimizing real persons by antisocial psychopaths. — 180 Proof

Yes, it's an interesting debate. Personally I disagree. I think that these anti-social tendencies are not desires which need sating (like hunger) but rather failures in certain systems of restraint. Given this model, further suppressing what little of that restraint might be left will worsen incidents of victimisation, not lessen them. It's rather like taking the brakes off a train because they're not working properly - the train is no better off without brakes than it is without working brakes.

Where I can see it working is in that using the VR will always be easier than trying it on a real person and so may act as a path of least resistance.

I still would worry about the safety of letting a person out into society who has just spent several hours treating 'seemingly' real people without compassion and yet suffered no consequence of doing so...

our knowledge of even the most apparently basic material objects is experiential in nature. — Wayfarer

... is not in any way opposed to...

the fundemental constituents of reality are material — Wayfarer

One talks about the constituents of that which causes our mental experiences, the other about how we come to know of it. Two different questions entirely.

it is easily forgotten that the mind of the detached scientific observer is still, after all, a mind. — Wayfarer

Is it? Can you provide an example from philosophical naturalism where this is 'forgotten'?

'But where is that "mind"?' will come the question. To which the answer is that it is never the object of cognition, nor is it amongst them — Wayfarer

Again. The former question is asking about the mind's physical location, the latter about how (and whether) we might ever come to know that. Two different questions. It's perfectly possible (though I don't personally believe so) that the seat of 'the mind' might just be some little cluster of neurons somewhere but we'd never ever be able to know that because we could not ever grasp the evidence showing it to be so. What things are and how we come to know them are two different things.

to grasp that requires a kind of self-reflection — Wayfarer

How so? Can you give an example of having 'grasped' it, and explain how it is you come to know they've 'grasped' it? If empirical analysis is apparently shackled by the limits of the mind examining itself, then how is non-empirical analysis any less shackled? Does non-empirical analysis take place somewhere other than the mind?

Isn’t that just your associative memory at work, guessing it’s a phone, and if you put more thought into it you might think that I would try to make it hard to guess and deliberately not use a phone. I’d love to hold a cute little pig though. — praxis

Yep. I might update my belief about the content of your hand to make it better fit other beliefs (like those about your intentions, character etc)

Suddenly it occurs to me now how much belief is a story or personal narrative for ourselves, our ego, strengthening individual as well as group identity. — praxis

Exactly.

think I get it. There's nothing anthropomorphic about a rock. And there's something at least slightly anthropomorphic about AI. — ZzzoneiroCosm

You do indeed get it.

I just don't see an ethical or moral issue. — ZzzoneiroCosm

We ought not be the sort of people who can hear cries of distress and not feel like we should respond.

If I see a child mistreating a doll I take him to be fantasizing about treating a human being in the same way. But the fantasy is the issue, not the doll. — ZzzoneiroCosm

Yeah, I'm fine with that narrative. I could phrase my concerns in the same way. If people mistreat life-like robots or AI they are (to an extent) toying with doing so to real humans. There's several parts of the brain involved in moral decision-making which do not consult much with anywhere capable of distinguishing a clever AI from a real person. We ought not be training our systems how to ignore that output.

The more you look into the 'seeming' part, the less grounds for it there seems to be. Maybe there's a misconception concerning the term 'sentience'. But AI's (pale) version of human linguistic abilities is no more evidence of sentience than a parrot's repetitions of human words are evidence of human understanding. — Baden

In the first part of this syllogism you take the 'seeming' from my comment, but in the sequitur you're referring to 'evidence'. I don't see 'seeming' and 'evidence' to be synonymous.

A doll which cries every few minutes might be described as being designed to 'seem' like a real baby. It's crying is not 'evidence' that it's a real baby. I'm not using 'seems like' in place of 'probably is'.

The point is about where ethical behaviour inheres.

Is it others who deserve or don't deserve ethical treatment on the grounds of some qualifying criteria...

Or is it us, who ought (and ought not) respond in certain ways in certain circumstances?

One might train soldiers to psychologically prepare to kill using increasingly life-like mannequins, each one helping them overcome their gut revulsion to harming another human. Would you say each step was harmless because none of them were real humans? If so, then how do you explain the loss of hesitation to harm others resulting from such training? If each step is harmless but the outcome not, where was the harm done?

You might well guess that I’m holding a phone. If you did guess that, would you believe it? — praxis

Yes. To a degree.

You can test this quite easily by asking me to bet on whether you're holding a phone or a small pig. I'd put more money on the phone. I believe the phone prediction more.

If we always make beliefs (predictions), then what do we believe when we can’t recognize, understand, or make any sense of something? — praxis

I depends on the thing. The feeling you might be inclined to describe as "not understanding something" is rarely as empty of sense as the expression suggests. Did you have a situation in mind where we might literally understand nothing at all of a sensory input, like absolutely draw a blank? I can't think of one.