Sam Harris On Defining Consciousness

[AFTT47]

I despise these arguments. I just don't feel equipped for them. I got into this when I was a new member (under 30-30 guy) and bennyboy was one of the people who frustrated the hell out of me. Now, I'm on his side.

Rhythm, I respect you as a good, logically-consistent debater but you're looking like a kook to me here.

I get that in the current environment, it's up to the individual to define consciousness. But your definition based on action strikes me as ridiculous. It's ridiculously easy to write a program who's actions will fool people into thinking it's conscious. Eliza is a famous example. My wife likes to joke about the time she had a go with Eliza. Eliza said, "You seem to feel intense." She replied, "In tents is where Arabs sleep." It's a joke but as you can imagine, Eliza would have choked on that badly. It's possible of course to program a much more sophisticated search algorithm into Eliza that might make sense of that remark and recognize it as humor. I think I could write such a program myself and I wouldn't categorize myself as anything more than an intermediate-level programmer. It might be pretty convincing to the average person based on its actions but do you really think such an Eliza 23.0 or whatever is actually aware of its existence, that it would feel terror as you reached for the computer off switch?

That's what we're talking about here. When we say, "consciousness," we're talking about something that feels its own existence, values it and is terrified of losing it - just like you and me. We're not talking about some relatively simple construct which can mimic the behavior of such.