[avastmick]

I really cannot understand consciousness. And if I am honest nor do I see peoples fascination with it. Especially now that scientists are trying to measure, they seem to come up short and some posit that it must a quantum effect or something else.

I am not sure what new learning all the research and thinking brings: I am lost it all the “arguments”; I really do not understand.

A lot of way smarter people than me think it’s a worthwhile concept to wrestle with. Maybe I’m just not smart enough to get it.

A lot of people way smarter than me agonised over the nature of the soul too. Is it that debate replayed? Are we just trying to justify humans “specialness”?

[moffkalast]

I think the core concept is pretty simple, it's meta cognition. A feedback loop of observing oneself for the purpose of understanding which part of your observations is yourself and which is the environment. Just like inteligence, its scales from rudimentary in animals to overdeveloped in humans.

The only way to know if it's genuinely occurring or not is to observe the internal state... which is a bit problematic for biological organisms since we tend to die in the process. But for AI it should be fairly straightforward to verify once DNN analysis progresses enough.

[blamestross]

Once you start considering it just metacognition, it gets to be a much more useful concept, but most people seem to desperately want it to be "special".

Ask any therapist, consciousness has limits, it has bound depth. It takes a lot of work to re-train it. It isn't a magical human only special thing.