As we construct increasingly complex artificial intelligences, the question of their moral status becomes all the more pressing. But answering this question alone isn’t enough to answer the deeper question of how we ought to treat AIs. To answer this, we need to know about their interests. This, in turn, requires knowing about the contents and valences of their mental states. Focusing on large...
Abstract Chapter 2 develops the nontheistic idealist account of the nature of reality—focusing on the contents and structure of the physical world. For the nontheistic idealist, physical reality is like a tapestry, weaving threads of phenomenology into a world of structured color, warmth, sound, and taste. The primary questions this chapter answers are: (i) What sorts of experiences make up the...