Susan Blackmore observed that you can implement all the known functionality of human consciousness by answering the question 'Are you conscious?' with 'yes'.
We don't have any broad agreement that it does anything else, and we know that we do lots of things unconsciously despite our commonplace beliefs to the contrary.
Blackmore's argument is that people say they are conscious when they are awake and you ask them, but that's its only known function. Your reply appears to assume this is wrong. Do you have an argument to support it?
Interesting, so someone who has never said those words has therefore never been conscious, and we can treat them as we treat anything lacking consciousness. Hooray, we just solved all human problems: if someone has a problem, just turn them into soylent green! But only if they don't say those words!
> so someone who has never said those words has therefore never been conscious
That is not the argument.
People may well be conscious (no matter what they've said). What is the function of consciousness? Intriguingly, upon some reflection, we know of nothing that could not be done without consciousness [1]. One can seek food, mate, avoid danger, and so on without consciousness. One can speak and be intelligent without consciousness. So, why did evolution endow us with consciousness? Big puzzle.
[1] And now for the footnote/joke (which illustrates the profound point made in the paragraph above): The only thing we know of that one cannot do without consciousness is this: to truthfully answer "yes" to the question "are you conscious?".
Upon almost no reflection, you could make a long list of things that cannot be done without consciousness, or at least cannot be done yet and we have no good reason to believe could ever be done without consciousness. Can you understand anything without consciousness? Can you have an identity without consciousness? The argument you're presenting is that if physical mimicry is close enough to the original then it is the same thing, if we just assume that consciousness is nothing. It's saying that Frankenstein's experiment was largely a success.
Maybe just the majority, but I'd flip it as well and say a lot of people seeking investment are also pushing AI on the dumbest things. I've just stepped back from a company that was doing this claiming they are using AI but only in rewriting marketing blurbs or something along the lines of analyzing log files, but zero usage in the actual workflows/products of the company. Reeks of desperation, or scammy to be less generous.
Sure. But you can’t let the assholes distract from the miracles. That goes for everything in life. If you look at what AI does today and what it did 10 years ago, we are clearly living in the future dude. It’s better than I dreamed it could be, and I’m super excited to see what the non assholes do next.
We've been living in the future since the 1950s. We put men on the moon. We have the microwave oven. We have supercomputers small enough to fit in your pocket. We've mapped the genomes. We've almost had the year of the Linux desktop, we've almost had fusion in 10 years. Now we're really close to almost having AI for 10 years?
Living in the future is just such an odd comment to me. I get your enthusiastic about it, but what you consider futuristic is different than what I would consider.
Both exist. I’ve seen a good number of folks who’ve gone from cryptocurrency to NFTs to AI in fairly quick succession, and I’m inclined to see that as grift.
Frankly, it is 1 script away. GPT-4 + a self-feeding script is conscious (obviously). Just not as conscious as a human being (but much more conscious than a sleeping human being).
Man, all these companies and engineers that wasted billions over a decade trying to crack self-driving cars are gonna have egg on their face after reading this
