Quote Originally Posted by Lady_Silvermoon View Post
Have I once said the Endless are alive? No. I said they are sentient. I said they are people. My breakfast had a nervous system, that's obviously not the metric we use to determine what is and isn't okay to kill. Roaches are alive. Flowers are alive. Our moral exemption isn't for all life, else we'd starve and die. The exemption is for people. It's wrong to wipe out people. It's wrong to enslave people. What makes something a person isn't a nervous system. Pigs have nervous systems, I still had bacon.

If something has a functional consciousness, it has a real consciousness. Are you conflating "real" with biological? While we haven't extended human rights to artificial lifeforms because we haven't met or created any where we'll have to decide their personhood. I'm really hoping that when we do get there that we do better than your average Black Mirror episode. What's the point of imagining all these dystopias if we're just gonna do e-slavery anyway when we get to that point?
Roaches and flowers meet the criteria for life that I listed. I wasn't aware you were arguing sentience because the ongoing discussion was about them being alive. As far as sentience, it's the same as with everything. They're sentient like.

Maybe real isn't the best word to use, my point is that it's consciousness-like.

As far as AI, the public very underestimates imo how challenging it's going to be to create something that would merit rights. That said, yes there could come a point where manage to create such organisms but that's not comparable to Endless, like, at all imo.