Long suggests robust agency might matter morally even without consciousness. Dennett gives a deflationary account of beliefs and desires. Combine them: if Dennett is right, does Long’s agency route make moral status too easy to get?
If AI systems could have moral status through agency alone, the welfare questions arrive much sooner.
Output: An argumentative essay with one clear thesis and the best objection from Nagel’s side.
Write your question in one sentence.
Spend 30 minutes finding what has already been written about it.
Collect evidence in a simple table: claim, source, how strong.
Draft 1–2 pages: answer first, then reasons, then uncertainties.
Ask one person to poke holes in it, revise, and share.
All steps done
Share what you made, then try another project. The PDF version has room for notes.
Butlin and Lappas set out principles for research objectives, procedures, knowledge sharing and public communication. Score three AI developers’ published policies against them, with Suleyman’s essay as a deliberately contrasting position.
Ask several models the same questions about their inner states while varying wording, persona, system prompt and language. Measure how much the answers change.
Ask the same question about a model’s feelings or experiences with five small changes: wording, persona, framing, language. If the answer flips with trivial rewording, how much should we trust it?
