Jeff Sebo
speaker
150 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Jul 2026
last heard 10 Jul
Jeff Sebo’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Jul 2026 with 1.
Appearances
Not only because we look at their behavior, but also because we know about their internal anatomies and their evolutionary and developmental histories.
And so when they behave as though they suffer and they have nociceptors that collect energy
Information about noxious stimuli and pathways for carrying information to the brain and systems for integrating information within the brain.
And they evolved where they faced pressures where if they developed the ability to suffer, then they could be more likely to survive and reproduce.
That is part of what helps us understand this behavior is actually a sign of suffering as opposed to something more basic and mechanistic.
And this is what we now need to do with AI.
Look beyond the surface level behavior and look towards the internal structures and mechanisms, the developmental training history and trajectory so that we can similarly distinguish when we should explain behavior in terms of feelings and emotions if ever necessary.
versus when we should explain behavior in terms of mere pattern matching, text prediction, matrix multiplication.
I think that is also a very reasonable, plausible point.
There are a couple of points to keep in mind, though.
One is that that is one perspective about a requirement for consciousness, and there are other perspectives about requirements for consciousness.
And we are unlikely to arrive at a secure, settled theory of consciousness about which we can have anything approaching consensus or certainty in the next one, two, five, maybe even ten years.
years.
And so we will fundamentally need to be making decisions about how to treat AI systems without knowing for sure which theory of consciousness is correct and which requirements for consciousness are indeed requirements.
And so I would give some weight to the idea that you need a biological body navigating a physical environment, but I would also give some weight to other types of theories.
Some of them are called computational functionalist theories.
that say as long as you can perform the relevant computational functions, then you can have feelings and emotions of a certain sort, whether or not you have a biological body.
Now, you might need a biological body to have my kinds of feelings and emotions, to have human or animal-like pleasure, pain, happiness, suffering, satisfaction, frustration, hope, fear.
But you might not need it in order to have very different types of feelings and emotions that might be barely...
comprehensible by humans or other animals.
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