in the now infamous Lex interview, Sam Altman proposes a test for consciousness (he attributes it to Ilya Sutskever): Somehow, create an AI by training on everything we train on now, _except_ leave out any mention of consciousness, theory of mind, cognitive science etc (maybe impossible in practice but stay with me here). Then, when the model is mature (and it is not nerf'd to avoid certain subjects) you ask it somet…
Any attempt at consciousness requires us to define the word. And the word itself may not even represent anything real. We have a feeling for it but those feelings could be illusions and the concept itself is loaded.
For example Love is actually a loaded concept. It's chemically induced but a lot of people attribute it to something deeper and magical. They say love is more then chemical induction.
The problem here is that for love specifically we can prove it's a mechanical concept. Straight people are romantically incapable of loving members of the same sex. So the depth and the magic of it all is strictly segmented based off of biological sex? Doesn't seem deep or meaningful at all. Thus love is an illusion. A loaded and mechanic instinct tricking us with illusions of deeper meaning and emotions into creating progeny for future generations.
Consciousness could be similar. We feel there is something there, but really there isn't.