Will AI ever = conciousness or sentience?

[DoktorZ]

The long post by Apophenia was very good, and provides some serious problems when it comes to thinking about non-human, inorganic (AI) consciousness. First:

Nonetheless, consciousness, in my view, is a result of specific processes and their supporting processes, and that without them, or something functionally equivalent, you will not have a machine possessed of consciousness and sentience, just an intelligent machine.

This boundary between intelligence and consciousness, as pointed out above by others, is a definitional problem. I'm not sure I followed A's discussion later, but the works critiquing introspection suggest that there are problems inherent in using the brain to understand the brain.

In a nutshell, if consciousness is a physical process of the brain, based on known physical processes, then it cannot have the properties which it thinks it does have.

In that context, the above quote makes sense.

However, "problems" does not mean that there is no method we have to reliably locate consciousness in the brain--or some combination of the brain and the nervous system. I don't want to put words in A's mouth because I confess I couldn't follow the discussion of temporality and location fully. Most neuroscience I've stumbled my way through recently makes most of the key aspects of what we'd recognize as 'consciousness' directly linked to the material development of that organ behind your eyes--e.g., theory of mind.

What A's post really triggers, in my mind, is a potential problem related to defining consciousness by using the human brain, which we don't fully understand anyway, as a kind of litmus for what a non-human form of it would look like. In a sense, you might end up with "no true Scotsman" fallacies in which nothing ever fits our own anthropocentric views of what consciousness should look like. On top of all this, as I said, there are methodological issues in using the brain to understand the brain.

In a way, identifying AI would be like finding extra-terrestrial life. From a biological standpoint, this problem is a lot easier to understand. If we assume extra-terrestrial life will look like what we already know, we may not find anything anytime soon...

In looking for AI, I just imagine a perpetually moving target in which humans reject all candidates due to their inability to replicate what we think consciousness should be--a standard that, in all probability, we'd probably fail to meet ourselves if we really understood how our brains work.

Z