Will AI ever = conciousness or sentience?

[The Grand Nudger]

First, thanks for helping me think this through. I need the challenge since what I think seems to me both obvious and hard to articulate.

What else are we referring to but the effect?

First and foremost I think we are referring to an immediate, subjective experience of being a being. We're in the world responding to shit. We find that stuff matters to us. So we might ask, how come? Reflection might reveal an element of upbringing, or, a moving play or book or relationship which may have had an impact on what matters to us. But it might also just strike us as stemming from normal mammalian drives or we might just not have any damned idea at all.

So what I think of as consciousness or sentience includes all of these things. We have an experience of what it feels like for a thing to matter. We recognize that it is our self, a particular being, which is having this reaction. It isn't the room I'm in which is hungry or feeling threatened, it's me ... this upright naked ape. We can reflect on how earlier experiences have shaped our response and sometimes, I think, that reflection can change our future experience of what matters.

I can imagine a program that would simulate these outwardly visible effects but I can't imagine why I should think that the effects correspond to the actual experience.

You might wonder if this leaves me a solipsist toward other people or animals but I would answer not at all. There is every reason to suppose your insides feel and work the way mine do. There is no reason I can imagine why I should think a machine or program which I understand has been constructed to mimic our outward appearance of being conscious actually is so.

- Doubtful in Berkeley.

Bolding is mine. Ital mine. What reason would that be? What if you didn't understand it?

@ bolded- I think I've been remiss in explaining the challenge. Like you, I wouldn't imagine AI to "think like we do", to experience things "as we do"....but I don't think that this would disqualify AI from being self aware, or intelligent, from being genuine. In the same way that other creatures may experience "consciousness" differently than we do, a machine may be capable of experiencing something (perhaps even by a similar means logic gates to nuerons) indistinguishable from consciousness, at which point it's difficult to see why we would withhold the term.


@ ital- The constant theme seems to be tricks, mimicry, but why do we imagine this, suppose we created AI not because we intended to do so, but by accident - we wouldn't understand it as a trick then...it wouldn't be any attempt to mimic ourselves. Why couldn't this occur? Our own awareness wasn't brought about "on purpose" and all of the same forces are acting on machines -in principle- that led to our own awareness. If you refer to tricks then it's understandable to conclude that a trick is not genuine. Try to distance yourself from the notion of a trick to begin with.

Let me offer something about "tricks" (the idea of a convincing simulation). We call it a "trick" because we know how it works. We know it isn't the real deal. Similar to mimicry, we call it such by reference to what we already consider "the genuine article". Notice that the premise and the conclusion are identical. It matters very little what we plug in between the two. But let me ask you this, if we ever figured out "how we work".....would it then seem like more of a trick than "the genuine article"? Probably not, But why not?

@ Both. Why assume that consciousness is somehow measured by our own as a "thing", and similarly why ignore those similarities our consciousness (and the structure we feel is at least somehow involved) has with things that are not ourselves? Why not consider "human consciousness" a -type- of consciousness that leverages principles which can be, though aren't always, leveraged by other things? Why assume that ours is the real deal and not a "trick" to begin with - wouldn't it be better to establish this than simply declare it..especially if we're trying to compare two proposed models of how something might be "conscious"? It bears mention in this, that I'm not trying to devalue your experience of consciousness by likening it to a "trick"...if it were a "trick" it would be a very valuable one, on that I think we both agree- just trying to pry this idea of what is or isn't trickery away from what is or isn't human, or like us. Trying to make this something other than bare bias towards what you and I possess and call "consciousness"

(I could argue against my own choice of words in this post all day long by the way...just hoping to have conveyed the general theme)