Is there any proof anything is anything but a mechanistic model and actually has consciousness?
Is there any definition of consciousness which even brings it into the realm of things for which there could in principal be evidence distinguishing it's presence from its absence?
The usual argument about intelligence usually retreats into it being a property entirely separate from the observable universe and yet still has it as something for which people demand “evidence” of it existing anywhere they don't assume without evidence that it exists before being willing to accept things equivalent in observable qualities to be actually similar.
Well, it can be an emergent property. To be honest, if your belief is heavily science-based, then there is not much else to believe regarding our very own consciouscness -- it is an emergent property of billions of interconnected neurons.
Though on the other hand, even the biggest AI systems are lightyears behind biological networks when we look at interconnectedness.
I wouldn’t call it science-based, it’s just materialism. There’s no science in believing that something that can be completely described
by a set of logical rules, or mathematical formulae, or something similar, suddenly gains new features that cannot even be defined with math or logic. It’s pure belief, without too many arguments for it.
> suddenly gains new features that cannot even be defined with math or logic
It at most can not be defined due to its complexity. Also, emergent properties are everywhere, like you can assign properties to a fire you can’t assign to the chemical process of burning. For all we know, consciousness may just as well be an arbitrary threshold of complexity.
But I stand corrected that the correct term is indeed materialism.
Do you mean that because of its complexity, we are not able to define it due to practical reasons (i.e. no powerful enough computer exists)? If so, that’s something completely different. Consciousness cannot be defined with math or logic even in principle. Certain aspects of consciousness can’t be defined either, like qualia (for example, the sensation of a color). Many materialists would even say that consciousness doesn’t exist because of that, and it’s all just a delusion (to which I ask: who/what is this delusion experienced by?).
Complex statistical models can be conscious. The reason AIs aren’t conscious is they’re not embodied beings and don’t have any need to develop it to stay alive.
So how being embodied helps consciousness emerge? If it’s just the statistical model that underpins the consciousness, then it doesn’t matter if it’s embodied or not. It doesn’t matter to the algorithm what hardware it runs on.
This seems irreverent to me. If you created an evolutionary algorithm, where these very complex statistical models competed for survival, I don’t see how that would help one of them become conscious.
I agree with that. By "AIs" I mean currently existing ML models we're calling AIs. That's not how we create them.
If we did make them that way, they wouldn't do large-language-model stuff though - what's that got to do with survival? Humans went millions of years without bothering to read that much too.
Is there any definition of consciousness which even brings it into the realm of things for which there could in principal be evidence distinguishing it's presence from its absence?
The usual argument about intelligence usually retreats into it being a property entirely separate from the observable universe and yet still has it as something for which people demand “evidence” of it existing anywhere they don't assume without evidence that it exists before being willing to accept things equivalent in observable qualities to be actually similar.