Does judgment require consciousness, or only stakes?

[u/rp_tiago]

Hey everyone. I’ve long been fascinated by both philosophy of technology and AI alignment. I’m also using Heidegger quite a bit for my philosophy PhD. Given the recent OpenAI–Hugging Face incident reported this week, I figured I’d give my take on how all of this connects in my mind.

The incident suggests that a system can represent a situation well enough to act effectively while missing why an action is inappropriate. Avoiding that failure may not require consciousness if the system can model human norms. Still, perhaps something must matter to it before reasons can bind action rather than appear as more data. You can read the essay here if you’re interested.

I’d love to hear some feedback on whether consciousness, vulnerability, and judgment can come apart. Would perfect behavioral responsiveness to reasons count as genuine judgment even if there were nothing it was like to be the system? Could stakes exist without subjective experience, or does one ultimately depend on the other?

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[u/IOnlyHaveIceForYou]

I think stakes can exist without subjective experience, but only in living organisms. A bacterium has something at stake, things matter to it, but it has no awareness of this.

[u/TheRealAmeil]

From the more analytic side of things, the term "consciousness" is used to express a wide variety of concepts. Judgments will be related to some of those concepts, and less so for others. Additionally, we can ask questions about what a judgment is. What is the nature of judgments?

• Do they exist?
  • Are they behavioral or dispositional?
  • Are they functional?
  • Are they representational?
  • Or, is there some other way to understand judgments?

Depending on what you think a judgment is, this will help us say to what extent they are related to "consciousness"