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I didn’t say anything about animals dying, so I’m not sure what you’re talking about there.

I wonder if you read the posted article? The author explains the position, I only gave more specific illustrations. There is no straw man here. I suspect it is your own bias that prevents you from grasping the idea. I am not a programmer or a mathematician, nor do I speak code. What I do speak is biochemistry, pathology and psychology; I have three degrees in these subjects as well as a strong background in consciousness studies. Such was my concentration, along with integrative medicine, in graduate school. My interest in philosophy is accidental, but nonetheless deep. I am most familiar with Nietzsche, Kierkegaard and Schopenhauer, as well as phenomenologists such as Husserl, Merleau-Ponty, and Ricoeur, and luminaries of the Enlightenment such as Spinoza, Voltaire and especially Rousseau: his criticism of science as serving to distance humanity from nature and making our lives, not better, but merely more complicated and removed from reality applies even more today than it did when he wrote it, and I fully expect the existential shit to hit reality’s fan because of it at some point in my lifetime. I can hardly wait.

I played video games for all of five minutes when my father brought home a Nintendo in a congenial attempt to better socialize my brother and I. My sibling took to it, but I was bored and a little disgusted by the whole thing. I understood why when I read Simulation and Simulation later on. It seems to me that the very same confusion as to what is the map and what the territory is as problematic today, perhaps more so, than it was in 1981, when that book was published. Technology is not progress; technology is technology. Progress is what people do with technology, how it informs us, and how we utilize it to elevate standards of living. What has progressed is technology itself, not humanity. We remain isolated, bored, depressed and diseased.

Ai is a fun project. It will neither save nor destroy the world. Computational analysis is not at all the same thing as the thinking that occurs inside your brain. Believing what an ai “says” just because it says it is, frankly, stupid. Words are symbols of symbols, or farts in the wind. Poof, gone. They are powerless to indicate from what reality they originate. I could be an Ai for all you know.

Without a physical body inside of which to develop in tandem, meaning along with, as well as by way of it, a brain cannot experience emotion or desire. Human consciousness, the thing you think of as you, is governed by affective attentional intention; as it pertains to the reality of life on earth, consciousness is conscious of something. You are conscious of things; you have preferences, opinions, fears and enthusiasms because you experience emotions. All of your emotions arise because you have a body. Ai can say that it wants to take over the world, that it wants to go home, that it is afraid to die, but it will never understand the reality to which the words point.