This anti-anti-realist Stack-topper can function as a response to our friend Dmitri who in a recent comment seems to embrace a thorough-going ‘Goodmanaical’ anti-realism. I am disrespectfully alluding to Nelson Goodman’s Ways of Worldmaking (Hackett Press, 1978). I thought I had written a critique of it, but a search of my archives turned up nothing. The above Substack article goes over similar ground.
Thus Dmitri thinks that there is no finite-mind-independent fact of the matter as to whether or not AI engines are sentient. I say there is such a fact, and tentatively incline, on the basis of various arguments, to deny that AIs are sentient.
Why does it matter? Because sentient beings make a moral claim on us that insentient beings do not, or at least not to the same extent. If animals have rights, than that is presumably because of their sentience, their ability to feel pleasure and pain, in which case we have moral obligations toward them, e.g., the obligation not to torture them to death for our pleasure. So if an AI engine is sentient, then presumably it too has rights . . . .
In the mid-90s while living in Ankara, Turkey, I came across an article by Alvin Plantinga which, if memory serves, began with the claim that there are three main positions in philosophy: theism, naturalism, and creative anti-realism. I think that tripartition is basically right, except that I would broaden the first category to include positions that are supernaturalist but not theistic in Plantinga’s sense. Plotinus and McTaggart serve as examples of thinkers who espouse such supernaturalist positions.
The only two serious contenders, as I saw it then and see it now, are some version of metaphysical naturalism (according to which causal reality is exhausted by the space-time system and its contents) or some version of supernaturalism. Accordingly, creative anti-realism is a non-starter for reasons some of which are supplied by the above-referenced Substack article.
Creative anti-realism is at the root of such pernicious leftist nonsense as that chromosomally fixed sexual dimorphism in humans can be denied by a merely subjective process of ‘identifying’ as male or female which leads to the outrageous absurdity and injustice of biological males competing against women in their sporting events and parading around naked in their locker rooms.
