The meta problem of consciousness is about explaining why people think they are conscious.
Even if we get such a result with AIs where AIs invent a concept like consciousness from scratch, that would only tell us that they also think they have sth that we call consciousness, but not yet why they think this.
That is, unless we can somehow precisely inspect the cognitive thought processes that generated the consciousness concept in AIs, which on anything like the current paradigm we won’t be.
Another way to frame it: Why would it matter that an AI invents the concept of consciousness, rather than another human? Where is the difference that lets us learn more about the hard/meta problem of consciousness in the first place?
Separately, even if we could analyze the thought processes of AIs in such a case so we would solve the meta problem of consciousness by seeing explanations of why AIs/people talk about consciousness the way they do, that doesn’t mean you already have solved the meta-problem of consciousness now.
Aka just because you know it’s solvable doesn’t mean you’re done. You haven’t solved it yet. Just like the difference between knowing that general relativity exists and understanding the theory and math.
The meta problem of consciousness is about explaining why people think they are conscious.
Even if we get such a result with AIs where AIs invent a concept like consciousness from scratch, that would only tell us that they also think they have sth that we call consciousness, but not yet why they think this.
That is, unless we can somehow precisely inspect the cognitive thought processes that generated the consciousness concept in AIs, which on anything like the current paradigm we won’t be.
Another way to frame it: Why would it matter that an AI invents the concept of consciousness, rather than another human? Where is the difference that lets us learn more about the hard/meta problem of consciousness in the first place?
Separately, even if we could analyze the thought processes of AIs in such a case so we would solve the meta problem of consciousness by seeing explanations of why AIs/people talk about consciousness the way they do, that doesn’t mean you already have solved the meta-problem of consciousness now.
Aka just because you know it’s solvable doesn’t mean you’re done. You haven’t solved it yet. Just like the difference between knowing that general relativity exists and understanding the theory and math.