I find it awfully suspicious that the vast majority of humans talk about experiencing consciousness. It’d be very strange if they were doing so for no reason, so I think that the human brain has some kind of pattern of thought that causes talking about consciousness.
For brevity, I call that-kind-of-thinking-that-causes-people-to-talk-about-consciousness “consciousness”.
I find it awfully suspicious that the vast majority of humans talk about experiencing consciousness. It’d be very strange if they were doing so for no reason.
And if interaction with such machines is the only ground you have for thinking that anything experiences consciousness, I think it would be reasonable to say that “consciousness” is whatever it is that makes those machines talk that way.
In practice, much of our notion of “consciousness” comes from observing our own mental workings, and I think we each have pretty good evidence that other people function quite similarly to ourselves, all of which makes that scenario unlikely to be the one we’re actually in.
I find it awfully suspicious that the vast majority of humans talk about experiencing consciousness. It’d be very strange if they were doing so for no reason, so I think that the human brain has some kind of pattern of thought that causes talking about consciousness.
For brevity, I call that-kind-of-thinking-that-causes-people-to-talk-about-consciousness “consciousness”.
Definition of “it has it if it talks about it” is problematic. You can make a very simple machine that talks about experiencing consciousness.
And that simple machine does so because it was made to do so by people experiencing consciousness.
How do you know?
I find it awfully suspicious that the vast majority of humans talk about experiencing consciousness. It’d be very strange if they were doing so for no reason.
And if interaction with such machines is the only ground you have for thinking that anything experiences consciousness, I think it would be reasonable to say that “consciousness” is whatever it is that makes those machines talk that way.
In practice, much of our notion of “consciousness” comes from observing our own mental workings, and I think we each have pretty good evidence that other people function quite similarly to ourselves, all of which makes that scenario unlikely to be the one we’re actually in.