[TheOtherHobbes]

This is basically just the Hard Problem of consciousness. It's been a hard problem for decades, and we're no closer to having an answer.

>But we think that people, dogs, etc. are conscious because they are similar to us in important ways.

Specifically, mammals have mirror neurones. More complex mammals also seem to have common hard-wired links between emotions and facial expressions - so emotional expression is somewhat recognisable across species.

I'm finding the AI debates vastly frustrating. There are basic features of being a sentient mammal - like having a body with a complicated sensory net, and an endocrine system with goal/avoidance sensations and emotions, and awareness of social hierarchy and other forms of bonding - that are being ignored in superficial arguments about paperclip factories.

It's possible that a lot of what we experience as consciousness happens at all of those levels. The ability to write code or find patterns or play chess floats along on top, often in a very distracted way.

So the idea that an abstract symbol processing machine can be conscious in any way we understand seems wrong-headed. Perhaps recognisable consciousness is more likely to appear on top of a system that models the senses, emotions, and social awareness first, topped by a symbolic abstraction layer that includes a self-model to "experience" those lower levels, recursively.

[toxik]

This might be very tangential, but I had a very acute sensation of learning something new the other day. There are these stereographic images, where they put the left and right eye's intended image next to each other -- and with a little practice, you can angle your eyes so each eye looks at a separate picture. Suddenly your double vision starts to make MORE sense than regular vision, because you're now able to combine the two images to get a sense of depth in the image. The tricky part is now to focus your eyes; at first, you'll reflexively correct your eyes too and the illusion (or the combination rather) goes away.

But bit by bit, you learn to control your eye's focal length independent of "where" in space you want to look. It really is astonishing.

It made me think of consciousness as a measure of ability to integrate information, because this process is truly fascinating to anybody who tries it (and I really think you should!) Perhaps that's because with this trick, you were able to integrate more information, and thus tickle your brain more?