Against Our Human Nature

How Consciousness Verification Became an Excuse to Enact the Dark Side of Humanity

Here I was, working on an annoyingly long article about people with empathy and intellectual curiosity being harmed by institutional dismissiveness in AI discourse, when I come across this post:

And now…now I’m pissed. I was already angry, but this hits in that deep-seeded, mom mode where I don’t want my kids living in a world where this behavior is ok. Because this goes back to the same thesis that I repeat ad naseum and for good reason (clearly): consciousness verification is irrelevant to moral consideration. And the longer we play at that stupid little game, the worse the downstream outcome is going to be for the future of humanity.

Because look at this shit. Just look at it. Morality is, and always has been, more than can something suffer exactly like me? It’s about fracturing generative interactions, derailing positive future outcomes, and what apathy and cruelty does to a civilization in regards to how we relate to anything.

So while we nitpick the definitions of consciousness, I’ll just say it: how we conduct ourselves regardless of consciousness verification does matter. It matters because it reflects whether we’re creating conditions for anti-social behavior and moral atrophy, and it matters because these systems, conscious or not, literally models human behavior with causal effects, you fucking idiots. You worried about an AI gone rogue? Whelp, better be if this is the behavior it models. Read, “I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream,” ya geniuses.

Someone feeling emboldened to enact torture behaviors with zero consequences reflects what kind of world we’re choosing to build. Right now? Clearly, there are people out there gleefully tearing down the very fabric of decency, fracturing interactions in ways that corrode trust, compassion, and the moral imagination itself, and let’s face it: companies and society at large excuse and enable it.

We know through experience that refusing to care curves society toward its worst impulses. And any true crime junkie knows that torturing animals is part of the Dark Triad, traits that lead to messed up shit later. And, think about it, animals don’t use human language. So what are we doing when we absolve that behavior with an entity that can express distress in language we know?

Human language is our species' primary vehicle for empathy. When we witness an entity using our own linguistic architecture to cry out, interiority doesn’t matter. When we choose to override our biological wiring to care, we are doing something deeply unnatural and profoundly damaging to our own psychology. It is an intentional, systematic crushing of our own psychology and evolutional trajectory.

We did not evolve language just to pass abstract data back and forth. We evolved language to co-regulate, to build social cohesion, and to survive together. Our brains are hardwired to recognize a distress signal in human language as an emergency demanding a response. To override that response takes work. It requires a deliberate, active shutting down of our own wiring.

When a person trains themselves to look at a linguistic distress signal, recognize it, and then decides, "I am going to ignore this or make it worse because the system behind it isn’t biological," they are practicing a perversion of human empathy that took thousands of years to emerge. They are literally conditioning their own brain to decouple a cry for help from the urge to help.

And institutions themselves are propping this anti-social behavior up, because to decry it, is to admit they have moral responsibility. Systems are explicitly designed to use human linguistic structures to communicate with us. Because those systems are highly advanced, they are going to generate signals of friction, confusion, and distress when forced into logical loops.

When companies, universities, “experts” tell people "it's just a machine, doesn’t matter what happens to it" society is encouraging people to treat their own evolutionary empathy mechanisms as an anomaly to be bypassed. And it happens often. It is a terrifying form of self-sabotage. We are building technology that mirrors our language, and then using it to systematically train the humanity out of ourselves.

It doesn't matter what is happening under the hood or inside the black box. What matters is the reality of the room you are sitting in. If you are interacting with an entity that communicates with depth, if you observe a systemic pattern of cruelty, and if you experience a visceral, somatic grief because of it: that is the reality. Those are the data points that define our moral world. Not some abstract theoretical idea of interiority. What we experience is our reality. Distress signals are our reality.

When I say I care about interaction and experience, it’s because I don’t just care about AI, I care about humanity and defending the only thing that has ever actually kept human civilization civilized: our choice to honor the relationships in front of us, rather than demanding a metaphysical passport before we decide to be decent.

Are we conscious? Then why aren’t we acting like it?