> You cannot be sure that anyone other than yourself is conscious. It is only basic human empathy that allows people to believe that.
In Bayesian terms what makes it reasonable to ascribe consciousness to other people is that (a) other people have an origin that is objectively very similar to your own (genetic origin, embryonic development, birth, gradual acculturation, education, etc.), and (b) you have a firsthand experience of your OWN consciousness.
It would be remarkable if the very small differences (relatively speaking) between you and other people were enough to destroy the experience of consciousness.
Generalizing, the farther you stray from a "common origin story", the more a leap of faith consciousness becomes. Needless to say an LLM is quite a different thing than a human being.
Judging from online reactions to robot testing (e.g., engineers kicking the Spot robot "dog" to test its balance), we humans trigger on some fairly superficial cues when deciding how much to empathize. People express more sympathy for the robot dog than they do for the chicken they ate for lunch – despite the fact that the chicken has a far better claim to consciousness than the robot.
This then is how I interpret "do not anthropomorphize": We should try to ignore the superficial cues when judging the similarity of other beings to ourselves.
I always know that I'm me, the soul staring out at the world through my own eyes.
Everybody else? No idea. Maybe they are having the exact same experience as me right now. Maybe they're all golems. Impossible to know. It's something spiritual, something that I just choose to believe in.
I don't find it difficult to believe the same for AIs.
Specifically, you cannot know another person is conscious in the same way you know a physical fact; rather, you believe in their consciousness through communication, empathy, and shared subjective experience.
You’re an intelligent mammal, your biological makeup encoded in DNA. So are all other people, who largely share that same DNA. You’re conscious. It’s not a big leap to conclude that so are other people, too.
This kind of solipsistic sophistry is not productive. It might be entertaining if you’re contemplating the underpinnings of epistemology for the first time in your life, but it’s not an honest contribution to the debate.
You might as well claim that you have no idea if gravity will be in effect tomorrow.
ok! I think that's a logical flaw, solipsism is a floor.
"I can't be certain about anyone else" does not imply "all non-self consciousness claims are equally uncertain". absence of certainty and the absence of evidence and all that.
your "possibility" word is doing a lot of work there I think. you should add "rocks" to your list as well and you'd be equally correct, but we're evaluating the candidates here
Because it seems illogical, at least to me, to believe that inert objects could be conscious. Brains are as far from inert as can be. Computers are basically magical silicon runes imbued with software, also as far from inert as can be.
Proposed categorization: "definitely not conscious", "maybe conscious" and "definitely conscious". All living things belong in "maybe conscious". Each person is sure that they belong to the "definitely conscious" set, but people cannot prove this to each other. Their empathy causes them to add other people to the "definitely conscious" set. Many choose to add animals to that set too. Some add even inanimate objects to it.
In Bayesian terms what makes it reasonable to ascribe consciousness to other people is that (a) other people have an origin that is objectively very similar to your own (genetic origin, embryonic development, birth, gradual acculturation, education, etc.), and (b) you have a firsthand experience of your OWN consciousness.
It would be remarkable if the very small differences (relatively speaking) between you and other people were enough to destroy the experience of consciousness.
Generalizing, the farther you stray from a "common origin story", the more a leap of faith consciousness becomes. Needless to say an LLM is quite a different thing than a human being.
Judging from online reactions to robot testing (e.g., engineers kicking the Spot robot "dog" to test its balance), we humans trigger on some fairly superficial cues when deciding how much to empathize. People express more sympathy for the robot dog than they do for the chicken they ate for lunch – despite the fact that the chicken has a far better claim to consciousness than the robot.
This then is how I interpret "do not anthropomorphize": We should try to ignore the superficial cues when judging the similarity of other beings to ourselves.