Would you update against other humans being conscious at all, if other humans told you they weren’t conscious?
No, I wouldn’t. I’ve read the works of a number of people who do write that they aren’t conscious (usually also with the claim that nobody else is either). I also have plenty of experience of people being simply mistaken about their mental states in other ways.
My model is that humans who say anything are almost certainly conscious, though their state of consciousness may be different from usual in some cases (asleep, hallucinating, drugged, blackout drunk, etc).
It is pretty trivial to write a program that prints “I am conscious” with essentially no possibility that this is true in any meaningful sense, so I don’t have the same expectation of computer programs. I expect that sufficiently complex programs can be conscious, and we should be cautious in claiming that any given program is not, but the statement by itself is meaningless.
No, I wouldn’t. I’ve read the works of a number of people who do write that they aren’t conscious (usually also with the claim that nobody else is either). I also have plenty of experience of people being simply mistaken about their mental states in other ways.
My model is that humans who say anything are almost certainly conscious, though their state of consciousness may be different from usual in some cases (asleep, hallucinating, drugged, blackout drunk, etc).
It is pretty trivial to write a program that prints “I am conscious” with essentially no possibility that this is true in any meaningful sense, so I don’t have the same expectation of computer programs. I expect that sufficiently complex programs can be conscious, and we should be cautious in claiming that any given program is not, but the statement by itself is meaningless.