[reaperman]

We don't have a good definition of consciousness or sentience. It needs to be specifically defined for every conversation. Generally we think we know approximately what version of "consciousness"/"sentience"/"intelligence" the other parties in a conversation mean by the context of their thesis, but sometimes confusion leads to people talking past each other.

[lostmsu]

For consciousness it is fairly easy to build a reasonable metric like IQ is for human intelligence. Simply take any game (turn based if you don't care about speed, and real-time if you do), and measure instantaneous skill level in that game. Then you'd see that common effects that lower consciousness would lower the metric like sleepiness or drunkenness, so it would have a decent predicting power.

In fact almost any game is such a measure, so given a spread of games of varying complexity you can get an idea of relative levels of consciousness all the way down to rats if not lower.

For instance, it was shown that GPT can play chess. I also just tried it on a tactical Dota question (not actual control), and that worked too.

[JohnFen]

> a reasonable metric like IQ is for human intelligence

IQ is not a reasonable metric for human intelligence.

[lostmsu]

Yes, there is a group of you guys who believe so for whatever reason.

The matter of fact is that it is a metric of human intelligence and of all known metrics of human intelligence it is one of the best. Considering you still gauge people on intelligence with something you came up internally that you consider reasonable, and that whatever is that that you use internally is almost certainly worse than IQ, I'd say you're full of shit and/or lack logic :)

[JohnFen]

That there are no better options than IQ doesn't mean that IQ is a reasonable measure.

It is a reasonable measure of intelligent-adjacent things, such as how good you are at taking tests. An IQ score does correlate pretty well with how well you'll do in college. But to say that it's measuring "intelligence" in any sort of strong way is misleading.

[lostmsu]

My parent comment already addresses your point. It is amazing you can't see that.

There are two questions:

Is it a measure? Undoubtedly.

Is it reasonable? Well, how'd you define reasonable? Would you say that if A is reasonable for something, and B is better than A for the same thing, then from "A is reasonable" follows "B is reasonable"? I would. So if you can claim a person to be a fool and another person to be smart based on some interaction and consider both statements to be reasonable, and if you concede that IQ would better (on average) predict that kind of stuff than you, therefore you should consider IQ a reasonable metric of intelligence. (But you don't, so I suspect you're not good at logical reasoning)

[JohnFen]

> (But you don't, so I suspect you're not good at logical reasoning)

Perhaps I'm not, but at least I'm good enough at it to be able to have a discussion without resorting to insulting the person I'm talking with.

[stevenhuang]

IQ or some form of it is an example of a reasonable metric

G-factor as a concept exists but can only be approximated by standard tests or equivalent.

IQ tests are imperfect and flawed, but it's the closest approximation to G factor we have.

[uoaei]

Philosophers of mind do have definitions of consciousness and sentience, but for some reason people keep ignoring or rejecting them.

For the purposes of this discussion, "consciousness" per se is mostly irrelevant. Sentience is still important but has less to do with intelligence than with experience (though sentience is still very much involved in acts of reasoning).

There are different kinds of reasoning, and those are probably more relevant to the discussion at hand re intelligence: associative, deductive, inductive, abductive, etc.