[badinfo]

What's the philosophical difference between your subjective experience of existence and a 90s-style power-on-self-test?

"I am on. I can tell that I am on. I dunno what I think once I am off." Same could be said of man, machine, consciousness, whatever.

What's incomprehensible is the baseless belief that consciousness is some special state of existence unique to balding, violent apes floating around a wet rock, anthropomorphizing all the crap around them just to make themselves feel special.

[ImprobableTruth]

Huh? Subjective experience is about whether the machine experiences the power-on-self-test, not about what it emits externally. Animals, machines or even rocks might all be conscious, but we simply don't know because it's impossible to ascertain through external means.

>What's incomprehensible is the baseless belief that consciousness is some special state of existence unique to balding, violent apes floating around a wet rock, anthropomorphizing all the crap around them just to make themselves feel special.

What a ridiculous strawman.

[badinfo]

> but we simply don't know because it's impossible to ascertain through external means.

Yeah, exactly. We haven't developed a good enough Turing test -- for machines, people, or gods.

> What a ridiculous strawman.

I don't believe is a strawman as much as you think it is. A lot of arguments for consciousness derive from the desire for humans to be special, which is in turn derived from Abrahamic cosmology that places us directly beneath their God.

[bserge]

A machine does "experience" it, even if through a very limited number of sensors and logic.