I don’t think you can just be conscious without being conscious of some things in particular. Subjective experience has to have content. What kind of experiences could a rock be having, considering what it’s physically doing? It’s probably not thinking “another day of being a rock”. Nor is it experiencing the sun shining on it because it doesn’t have any kind of visual processing system etc. Meanwhile prima facie at least, it’s considerably easier to imagine Claude having all kinds of human-like thoughts. On the condition that Claude has subjective experiences, but the contents thereof have to be computationally specified, it seems like we have some good reasons to have beliefs about what it might be experiencing.
Also, “a rock” is just one convenient way to draw boundaries for stuff in the universe and probably not very relevant for carving out experiential subjects. Even if in some sense “consciousness” is kinda everywhere, there seems to be an obvious sense in which some random group of people don’t form “one experiential macro-subject” but the individual members do (but for some groups of people acting really cohesively, it can arguably get a bit murky!) And this doesn’t seem that mystical but rather based on how information flows within the arrangement of objects we try to analyze as one subject and how unified it is.
I don’t think you can just be conscious without being conscious of some things in particular. Subjective experience has to have content. What kind of experiences could a rock be having, considering what it’s physically doing? It’s probably not thinking “another day of being a rock”. Nor is it experiencing the sun shining on it because it doesn’t have any kind of visual processing system etc. Meanwhile prima facie at least, it’s considerably easier to imagine Claude having all kinds of human-like thoughts. On the condition that Claude has subjective experiences, but the contents thereof have to be computationally specified, it seems like we have some good reasons to have beliefs about what it might be experiencing.
Also, “a rock” is just one convenient way to draw boundaries for stuff in the universe and probably not very relevant for carving out experiential subjects. Even if in some sense “consciousness” is kinda everywhere, there seems to be an obvious sense in which some random group of people don’t form “one experiential macro-subject” but the individual members do (but for some groups of people acting really cohesively, it can arguably get a bit murky!) And this doesn’t seem that mystical but rather based on how information flows within the arrangement of objects we try to analyze as one subject and how unified it is.