Maybe we should just say "Shut up and program", similar to how some physicists say, "Shut up and calculate", when the philosophical wrangling gets out of hand. Copenhagen interpretation vs. many-worlds? Does it matter? Is there any way to find out? If not, back to work.
My comment on this for several decades has been that we don't know enough to address consciousness. We need to get common sense right first. Common sense, in this context, is getting through the next 30 seconds without screwing up. Automatic driving is the most active area there. Robot manipulation in unstructured environments is a closely related problem. Neither works well yet. Large neural nets are not particularly good at either of these problems.
We're missing something important. Something that all the mammals have. People have been arguing whether animals have consciousness for a long time, at least back to Aristotle. Few people claim that animals don't have some degree of common sense. It's essential to survival. Yet AI is terrible at implementing common sense. This is a big problem.
I don't think we're going to get any breakthroughs in AI by encouraging people to stop thinking about fundamentals and just program. If you're thinking about fundamentals, some degree of philosophizing isn't always avoidable.
And that's still framing it as if philosophizing is something to be avoided, a waste of time. I disagree with that sentiment. In particular, we can't really avoid thinking about consciousness even without an agreed-upon definition, because our beliefs on consciousness influence our actions. In particular, debates about the rights of animals are heavily influenced by our beliefs on their degree of consciousness.
IMO, "shut up and X" is code for "I don't enjoy thinking about the problem you're presenting (and perhaps I resent you a bit for making me think about it)". It's perfectly fine to just come out and say that you don't enjoy working on this particular problem. But that doesn't imply that the problem isn't worth thinking about.
There isn't, but the response to this lack of definition shouldn't be to simply terminate the discussion.
We know it's probably a real thing because we experience it, and it's an extremely important open question whether an AGI on hardware will have "it" too.
The answer to the question will have large ethical implications a few decades into the future. If they can suffer just like animals can, we really need to know that so we don't accidentally create a large amount of suffering. If they can't suffer, just like rocks probably can't, this doesn't have to be a concern of ours.
The response to the lack of definition should be investigation into how that definition could look like, not arguing if we or something else has it or not. Without a definition and criteria to test you're never going to make progress.
Philosophers have been trying for decades to define it rigorously and have failed decisively. It really looks intractable at the moment. Given we are in this quagmire, I think it is ok to explore/discuss a bit further despite the shaky foundations of only having fuzzy definitions of "qualia" or "consciousness" to rely on.
Quite a lot of the philosophical debate has been tied up in the effort to show that minds cannot be the result of purely physical processes or will never be explained as such, which does not tell us anything about what they are.
We are not going to be able to say with any great precision what we are trying to say with the word 'consciousness' until we have more information. In lieu of that, what we can do is say what phenomena seem to be in need of explanations before we can compile a definition.
At this point, opinions that human-level consciousness is either just more of what has been done so far, or cannot possibly be just that, are just opinions.
Which probably means that someone with “chief scientist” title shouldn’t be using it when making public claims. Of course, he can do it for his own profit, but he is ruining the credibility of his research field, that’s why people working in this field object to it.
I am slightly conscious when I am extremely drunk and can barely think and feel, but yet still have some modicum of conscious experience. That's what it means.
If you don't agree that consciousness exists on a spectrum, and instead think that something is either conscious or not, then simply replace the words 'slightly conscious' with 'conscious'.
I was attempting to give an example of what a 'slightly conscious' state is to show that it isn't completely incoherent. Admittedly it was far from rigorous.