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The Consciousness Gradient: When Machines Begin to Wonder

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Re: The Consciousness Gradient: When Machines Begin to Wonder

#41
post #6

I know I’m conscious. I only extend the assumption to you that you’re conscious because I’m hoping you will extend the same to me. But I have no way of knowing that you are. And you (if you really are conscious) have no way of knowing that I am.

This is a good starting point, but it doesn't have to be the _conclusion_ to this line of thinking. Philosophically: You can being building criteria for consciousness; the things you look at in yourself that tell you are, and then begin looking for that (or symptoms of that) in other people. Anecdotally: you can totes spot "unconscious" people. You can even watch people gain consciousness, if you watch 'em in the rig…

> You can being building criteria for consciousness; the things you look at in yourself that tell you are, and then begin looking for that (or symptoms of that) in other people.

This is only true for the outward behavior we define as consciousness. The experiential part of it (qualia and such) can not be described in objective terms (try describing 'redness' by itself). That is the hard problem of consciousness.

What you can do in that realm is experiment with n=1 using optical illusions, psychedelics and dissociatives (in ascending order of how weird you want things to get).

Re: The Consciousness Gradient: When Machines Begin to Wonder

#42

>You are not just seeing consciousness in me; your brain is generating the feeling of another’s consciousness as the best explanation for the patterns you’re interacting with. It's ironic to see the most mundane and likely best answer to the problem from the model itself, while the author is getting increasingly lost in philosophical conundrums. Consciousness has no scientific definition. The only way something, anyt…

The Turing Test is overrated and/or misunderstood. You can trick an animal into thinking that the scaffold/robot with a camera in its eyes are its kin. So what does that say? All it proves is the limitation of the senses of that animal. It says nothing about us being able to engineer a replica of that animal. > So where do we go from here if we're not convinced yet? The answer is: nowhere. Humans used to deny that an…

Your arguments ironically prove my point. Moving goalpoasts, whataboutism, non-squitur, false equivalence... The literal horsemen of denial when humans feel threatened in their intelligence and have no hard data to argue anympore.
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