I think Tom Hanks was in a film where he believed a volleyball was a person at some point in his journey where things weren't going so well. He would talk to it and it talked back (in his mind). We knew it was a volleyball and not a person. We know everything is not a person. If we said everything was a person, then it kind of doesn't make sense at that point to use that word. We should just use the word "everything". We would have to have another name for person that meant a person. It's just easier to call it "person".
What I mean by consciousness is more like how some chatbots (fake it) and animals demonstrate it (like us and dogs etc). Person's in a brain-lock situation even have activity that can be sensed by machinery and produce cursor movements on a screen where they can answer questions so they can demonstrate consciousness. That's more what I mean. Maybe I need to call it...sentience?
So far, rocks and sticks can't do that, but if this text is also conscious as its some magnetic charges on some discs somewhere, then I may be offending it.
That "consciousness" is limited to "people" results in a very limiting definition of consciousness. At some point, it's probably better to at least pretend that something you regard as a non-person is conscious, if only in order to make reasonably accurate predictions about the world.
The problem with your definition is that it excluded forms of life that do not have actors and sensors. Implying that consciousness is not a mental property, but rather a property of being physically able to manipulate the world.
I.e. you are saying Stephen Hawking is definitely less conscious than an average human with functioning arms and legs. In its essence, you are too focused on your own experience of reality.
The problem is we're trying to second guess what consciousness is, and win the battle by defining the word in a convenient, but binary way.
Technically we have no clue if humanity is conscious. We only know "I am conscious, and those other things are humans like me, so I think they may also be".
Some extend this to animals (which they should) but try to draw some random line like "if it can't recognize itself in a mirror, it's not conscious" but even a fly may recognize itself in a mirror occasionally. It's not a magic rule.
Let's face it, just like intelligence is much simpler and much more pervasive than we thought (just put neurons in a big network), consciousness is likely everywhere around us. It may simply be a conscious universe.
There's nothing special about the substrate and constitution of animate matter, compared to what we consider inanimate matter, except that we're organized to preserve low entropy and transform inputs into outputs in complex ways. So are machines, computers and AI. And so the debate on how to classify this dish of neurons seems superfluous.
We should respect all systems and try to be in harmony with them.
I think a lot of people end up mixing being alive with being conscious. Is a tree conscious? Is a self driving car conscious?
If we use the definition "Aware of its surroundings, responding and acting towards a certain goal" then a lot of things fit that definition.
When an AI plays the atari games, learns from it and plays at a human level, I would call it conscious. It's not a human level conscious agent but conscious nonetheless.
I tend to ascribe "consciousness" or "personhood" to other HN posters although I haven't checked they have bodies or are AI. It's more how you behave / think.
Do you, then, agree that a machine that is built to work in the same manner as that single-cell organism (which I assume should be possible with the current technological level humans are at) is also conscious?
That path would lead to a conclusion that all matter is, in some way, conscious. I don't disagree, but I find that such definition of consciousness diverges from what we usually mean by it - a walking, talking being that has thoughts and can communicate them to us, or something.
I think what I was getting at is that it may be impossible to tell from the outside if something is conscious or not. If I can't even prove to myself that another person is conscious, I might have a hard time proving that a computer is conscious.
This is exactly the right question. Further complicated by the fact that everyone has differing operational definitions of the words "consciousness", "awareness", and "sentience".
Yes, but you can't observer other people's consciousness, only infer it. This is a problem when it comes to animals, infants, intelligent machines and coma patients. Or aliens if we ever made contact.
There's nothing saying a fully functional human must have consciousness. It could just be that some people are machines acting on biologically coded rules, and that they don't have an inner experience of their self.
Do you believe it makes sense to even claim that other humans are conscious?
If conscious is defined as “to have subjective experiences”, then I don’t believe “other people are conscious” is coherent.
The argument I hear usually is that other bodies are constructed like my body and I’m conscious therefore they are probably conscious too.
But I think this completely misses the point. The issue is the proposition itself. How can that proposition be translated into empirical claims? If the answer is just that other bodies are like my body, then conscious is just a fancy synonym of “is a human being”.
Sure, absolutely. I agree that we could construct a battery of tests such that any entity passing should be given the benefit of the doubt and treated as though it were conscious: granted human (or AI) rights, allowed self-determination, etc.
> I don't even know that other humans are conscious entities
Exactly. Note that the claim Retra is making (to which I was responding) was very much stronger than this. He is arguing not just that we should generally treat beings that seem conscious (including other people) as if they are, but that they must by definition be conscious, and in fact that it is a self-contradictory logical impossibility to speak of a hypothetical intelligent-but-not-conscious creature.
What I mean by consciousness is more like how some chatbots (fake it) and animals demonstrate it (like us and dogs etc). Person's in a brain-lock situation even have activity that can be sensed by machinery and produce cursor movements on a screen where they can answer questions so they can demonstrate consciousness. That's more what I mean. Maybe I need to call it...sentience?
So far, rocks and sticks can't do that, but if this text is also conscious as its some magnetic charges on some discs somewhere, then I may be offending it.
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