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To be fair, whereas 30% of the population voted against this horrible outcome, the other 70% were either actively in favor or passively indifferent to it.

True, even the most up-to-date academic research on the subject cannot withstand the “science” of your gut feelings.

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It was silly to bring up Philosophy of Mind when there are intellectual powerhouses like you around here equipped with gut feelings.

There’s a really cool position in Philosophy of Mind called Hylemorphic Dualism, which actually preserves (makes sense of) our intuitions about “souls” without breaking physics.

Did you just compare actual living sapient people with thoughts and feelings to an unconscious, unborn fetus?

Maybe you have a lot in common with a fetus. I don’t.

Exactly, the whole point is that she wasn’t a loser at all. It was about self-perception.

I don’t want to conflate the pragmatic use of tools or manipulation of the environment with questions about the meaning of life. Even most humans can’t do the latter. We have a lot of depressing research showing that most people can barely engage in abstract reasoning at all, let alone willingly or effectively.

I think nearly every sentient creature can be depressed and understand how badly life is going. But that’s different.

The information that aliens created us for some particular purpose is empirically interesting but normatively insignificant.

It’s not that cats can’t ask questions. It’s that they can’t ask abstract questions. That’s quite different.

if you wake up in a compound, catered to your every need by weird alien captors, “why am I here?” is a pretty obvious question.

Second-order questions aren’t just the prosaic things any intelligent creature would ask, such as “why am I here?” or “what do you want from me?”

but also the more esoteric, “what sort of creature are you?” And “what sort of creature am I?”

Animals (and, indeed, most humans) don’t ask (or don’t really understand) second-order questions very well because that requires abstraction, which is the sort of reasoning that requires enormous amounts of education and curiosity.

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Well, curiosity comes in different stripes. Investigating your environment is one thing. Asking second-order questions is another.

“May I have food?” vs “Why am I here?” and “What is the nature of consciousness?”

Yeah, when my cat meows, it is “asking” for snacks. But it’s not inquiring about snacks, or curious about where the snacks come from or why cats enjoy snacking so much.

Granted, many humans don’t ask such questions either, but that’s because intellectual acuity is on a spectrum also occupied by non-human animals, at least in the realm of being an incurious dumbass.

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Oh no! Anyway

Nah, I think it should be optional. Some AI features may even be useful — like an AI script to get rid of AI slop or something, idk.

The fact that you think this has any bearing on what I said underscores my point.