“Consciousness” is a word that denotes a cluster of concepts. That’s one of the sources of ambiguity. One of the least philosophically important concepts is being aware of ones surrounding s, which certainly isn’t restricted to humans. One of the most philosophically important things is qualia. Most people don’t think only humans have qualia. Having qualia implies the ability to feel pain and is therefore high my relevant to moral patienthood; again, most people don’t t think moral parenthood is restricted to humans.
This makes consciousness defined at least partially extensionally:
True, but it has little bearing on whether consciousness is restricted to huma ns.
People asking about whether a large language model is conscious seems vaguely analogous to a civilization of people with legs but no arms had a word that could be translated either “limb” or “leg”, who then encounter humans with arms, and wonder whether arms count as <word for limb/leg> or not
One can formulate and pose a series of more precise questions, rather than giving up
. I don’t know how to come up with questions we should be asking instead.
The conceptual breakdown has already occurred …we have access consciousness, phenomenal consciousness, and sense of self, etc. It’s ready made, but the people trying to investigate AI consciousness aren’t applying it. It’s possible to apply prior art that wasn’t invented in the rationalsphere.
Some humans have congenital insensitivity to pain but can still experience sensory impressions like redness. Pain is a quale but not every system with qualia has pain.
I tried to address this sort of response in the original post. All of these more precise consciousness-related concepts share the commonality that they were developed using our perception of our own cognition and seeing evidence that related phenomena occur in other humans. So they are all brittle in the same way when trying to extrapolate and apply them to alien minds. I don’t think that qualia is on significantly firmer epistemic ground than consciousness is.
were developed using our perception of our own cognition and seeing evidence that related phenomena occur in other huma
By mean the same outward behaviour could be accompanied by different, inaccessible phenomenology. Maybe. But that doesn’t mean only humans,have consciousness. And note that we can’t access each others private phenomenology!
“Consciousness” is a word that denotes a cluster of concepts. That’s one of the sources of ambiguity. One of the least philosophically important concepts is being aware of ones surrounding s, which certainly isn’t restricted to humans. One of the most philosophically important things is qualia. Most people don’t think only humans have qualia. Having qualia implies the ability to feel pain and is therefore high my relevant to moral patienthood; again, most people don’t t think moral parenthood is restricted to humans.
True, but it has little bearing on whether consciousness is restricted to huma ns.
One can formulate and pose a series of more precise questions, rather than giving up
The conceptual breakdown has already occurred …we have access consciousness, phenomenal consciousness, and sense of self, etc. It’s ready made, but the people trying to investigate AI consciousness aren’t applying it. It’s possible to apply prior art that wasn’t invented in the rationalsphere.
Some humans have congenital insensitivity to pain but can still experience sensory impressions like redness. Pain is a quale but not every system with qualia has pain.
I tried to address this sort of response in the original post. All of these more precise consciousness-related concepts share the commonality that they were developed using our perception of our own cognition and seeing evidence that related phenomena occur in other humans. So they are all brittle in the same way when trying to extrapolate and apply them to alien minds. I don’t think that qualia is on significantly firmer epistemic ground than consciousness is.
By mean the same outward behaviour could be accompanied by different, inaccessible phenomenology. Maybe. But that doesn’t mean only humans,have consciousness. And note that we can’t access each others private phenomenology!