Raw LLM Responses

That was a nice little essay. I like that you mentioned "complex social structures", because that's close to mentioning human culture, and close to mentioning human knowledge, which I think is the thing that actually matters to the question. I also like that after giving the usual criterion of "complexity of consciousness" (whatever that really means), you went a step further and asked *why* we should value that thing, and whether it isn't arbitrary. I enjoyed it so much that I won't even directly mention the typo where you appear to suggest that Paul McCartney and Ringo Starr should have fewer rights than tree shrews. I'm fond of Ringo, and even Paul is in his seventies by now and deserves some compassion. So I'm quite interested in artificial intelligence, which as you might realise has relevance to the animal rights debate. I notice that people tend to assume that steady progress is being made in the field, and that it's only a matter of incremental progress to go from the weak AI we have today, that identifies faces and drives cars in optimal conditions, to the strong AI that can have an intellectual conversation and imagine meaningfully original things. In particular it has to create new ideas. I don't think this is a matter of incremental progress at all, I think strong AI is to be discovered by barking up a completely different and as yet unknown tree. Nobody to my knowledge has yet suggested that a self-driving car should have rights, but I think the assumption that it is a step along the road to human-level intelligence exhibits the same naivety as to assume that animals - any of them - are like people. I think the important thing that human brains do is to contribute to a far-reaching body of knowledge - the only one we know of (unless you count knowledge encoded in genetics), which is human knowledge. I dismiss animals as fleshy robots because they don't generate ideas worth talking about. This point of view leads to various predictable nit-picks about,