My initial response to the question in the title, without reading the article or any other comments:
About as sure as I am that other humans are conscious, which is to say ~98% (I tend to flinch away from thinking I’m the only conscious person in existence, but all I have to go on is that so far as I know, we’re all using extremely similar hardware and most people say they’re conscious, so they probably are.).
The trouble is that this is an outside view; I haven’t the faintest idea what the inside view would be like. If a small portion of my brain was replaced with an artificial component, I would have no idea how to predict what that would feel like from the inside, but expect that it’d look like I was still conscious from the outside. I’m personally concerned with the inside part, and that’s a huge unknown.
But if we had emulations running around, I’d almost definitely think of them as people just as much as everyone else in the world, and I’d treat their reports on consciousness the same.
For part of that 2%, you may consider the possibility that brains do not produce consciousness/qualia, and your actual consciousness is implemented on a different sort of hardware, outside the matrix.
(Does telling you this fairly specific story in any way budge the 2% number?)
I’d say it fits pretty well inside the 2% (I was kinda worried 2% was a bit large, but had to take into consideration that I’m not actually a neuroscientist, among other things, including the simulation hypothesis).
My initial response to the question in the title, without reading the article or any other comments:
About as sure as I am that other humans are conscious, which is to say ~98% (I tend to flinch away from thinking I’m the only conscious person in existence, but all I have to go on is that so far as I know, we’re all using extremely similar hardware and most people say they’re conscious, so they probably are.).
The trouble is that this is an outside view; I haven’t the faintest idea what the inside view would be like. If a small portion of my brain was replaced with an artificial component, I would have no idea how to predict what that would feel like from the inside, but expect that it’d look like I was still conscious from the outside. I’m personally concerned with the inside part, and that’s a huge unknown.
But if we had emulations running around, I’d almost definitely think of them as people just as much as everyone else in the world, and I’d treat their reports on consciousness the same.
For part of that 2%, you may consider the possibility that brains do not produce consciousness/qualia, and your actual consciousness is implemented on a different sort of hardware, outside the matrix.
(Does telling you this fairly specific story in any way budge the 2% number?)
I’d say it fits pretty well inside the 2% (I was kinda worried 2% was a bit large, but had to take into consideration that I’m not actually a neuroscientist, among other things, including the simulation hypothesis).