(January 17, 2022 at 7:58 pm)GrandizerII Wrote: Your first paragraph, however, is confusing to me. I'm not sure why you don't think the way that qualia presents itself to us is a challenge for us to explain. And you say the conscious mind must have some experience, but then why must there be a conscious mind in the first place? How is it arising?
If you are asking "why must there be a "me"" that experiences consciousness, that is the harder question. Consciousness itself is something the brain has evolved (I understand this explains nothing, but bear with me). Consciousness is a process that does a few things - it creates a model of the world and the self in order to predict the future and make survival choices. No, we don't know everything about this mode of operation, but for it work, it must have something like "qualia" that are the inputs of conscious experience.
I think AI will one day become conscious, but it may require replicating much of how the human brain works. A sense of self is likely necessary for survival purposes. If an AI is in a data center, it likely doesn't need consciousness. If it is part of a moving robot that has limited connection to other AIs, a sense of self is a whole lot more useful.
