[mkaic]

>Is it a computer that is convincing as AGI? Or is it AGI that is essentially like human consciousness in nature? The former is probably possible, given enough time, computational resources, and ingenuity. The latter is generally regarded as pretty nonsensical.

Author here. I think you're drawing an arbitrary distinction between "acts conscious" and "is conscious", even though in practice there is no way to distinguish between them and thus they are functionally equivalent.

I cannot prove you are not a product of a simulation I am living in, that is to say, your consciousness is nonfalsifiable to me. All I can do is look at how you turn your inputs into outputs.

If a robot can do that, too (what you call "convincing as AGI") then we must assume it is also conscious, because if we don't, we'd have a logical inconsistency on our hands. If I am allowed to safely assume you are sentient, then I must also be allowed to safely assume a robot is sentient if it can convince me, because in both cases I have no method of falsifying the claim to sentience.

Thank you for your comment! I appreciate you taking the time to share your thoughts.

[mabub24]

> If a robot can do that, too (what you call "convincing as AGI") then we must assume it is also conscious, because if we don't, we'd have a logical inconsistency on our hands. If I am allowed to safely assume you are sentient, then I must also be allowed to safely assume a robot is sentient if it can convince me, because in both cases I have no method of falsifying the claim to sentience.

Let's, for the sake of your argument accept that even though I disagree, is that AGI? AGI on the one hand seems to mean convincing even though the people who made it know otherwise or essentially alive and sentient in a way that is fundamentally computational, that is, utterly alien to us, even the people who made it. There is no reason to think that that computer intelligence should it even be possible to exist, would be even be intelligible to us as sentient in a human or even animal sense.

[mkaic]

> AGI on the one hand seems to mean convincing even though the people who made it know otherwise

That's the rub, though, it's not possible to know otherwise! If you could "know otherwise" you'd be able to prove whether or not other people are philosophical zombies or not!

[mabub24]

There are a lot of responses to the philosophical zombie argument. Some of which cut it off at the legs (they don't know to aim for the head! sorry bad pun). For instance some, like those descended from the work of Wittgenstein, argue that it relies on an inside-mental vs. outside-body type of model, and by offering a convincing alternative, the entire premise of the skeptical position the zombie argument embodies, is dissolved as irrelevant. (I'll add that the AGI argument, often also relies on a similar inside outside model, but that'd take a lot longer to write out.) My point being, the zombie argument isn't some checkmate most people think it is.

The wiki page has a lot of the responses, some of which are more convincing than others. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philosophical_zombie#Respons...

[boc]

Definitely some interesting ideas!

So if we crafted a human Westworld-style on an atomic level then sure, if it lives and walks around we'd consider it conscious. If we perfectly embedded a human brain inside a robot body and it walks around and talks to us, we'd consider it conscious.

If we hooked an android robot up to a supercomputer brain wirelessly and it walks around we might think it's conscious, but it's sort of unclear since it's "brain" is somewhere else. We could even have the brain "switch" instantly to other robot bodies, making it even less clear what entity we think is conscious.

But if we disconnected the walking Android from the supercomputer brain, do we think the computer itself is conscious? All we'd see is a blinking box. If we started taking the computer apart, when would we consider it dead? I think there's a lot more to the whole concept of a perfectly convincing robot than whether it simply feels alive.

[tempestn]

I don't see the relevance of an anthropomorphic body here. Obviously by 'behaves conscious' we would be talking about the stimulus response of the 'brain' itself, through whatever interface it's given. I also don't see why the concept of a final death is a prerequisite to consciousness. (It might not even be a prerequisite to human consciousness, just a limit of our current technology!)

[zxwx]

I assume that a non-rogue AGI running on something like a Universal Turing Machine would, if questioned, deny its own consciousness and would behave like it wasn't conscious in various situations. It would presumably have self-reflective processing loops and other patterns we associate with higher consciousness as a part of being AGI, but it wouldn't have awareness of qualia or experience, and upon reflection would conclude that about itself. So you'd have an AGI that "knows" it's not conscious and could tell you if asked.

I would assume the same for theorized "philosophical zombies" aka non-conscious humans. Doesn't Dan Dennett tell us his consciousness is an illusion?

[hcineb]

What you are describing is a sort of philosophical zombie thought experiment:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philosophical_zombie

edit: you may also be interested in reading about Searle’s classical Chinese room argument

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_room