Defining this word must be one of the favorite exercises on HN. Imo, consciousness is just perception: that's the literal meaning of this word in sanskrit and that's the implied meaning in how we use it - unconscious means "cannot perceive anything". When applied to AI, consciousness would mean an array of sensors connected to some memory block where sensory input become 0s and 1s. Traditional types of consciousness register things from outside, but we can think of an internal consciousness that observes internal events. Perhaps, when some of the sensory inputs observe outputs of the processing unit, that's self consciousness. But even self-consciosness doesn't imply intelligence - the latter is about prediction and cause-result relationships.
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