Seeing red

[The Grand Nudger]

All definitions of all terms are, essentially, arbitrary.  

Definitions are arbitrary, but reality, for which we make labels, isn't.

So sayeth the "skeptic" who can't even decide whether or not his experiences are referent, let alone what they're referent to?  You'll need to come a whole lot harder to make this statements of your own stick. Why can't reality be arbitrary, it's just an idea..............

You can define a cat however you want, but that meowing furry thing is going to need a name.  Similarly, when I wake up and the lights come on in my mind, that's "mind."  You can call an AI system a mind if you want, but then we'll need a new word for the thing I'm talking about-- unless we have sufficient reason to believe they are the same, which IMO we don't.

I can, and I can define a cat as such that cat and dragon are equals, therefore there are no cats in the world.  All these meowing things just share similarities /w cats - which don't exist.  Such is the power of definitions in formal logical statements.   Similarly, you can call mind whatever you want, and if photons have mind I must have "supermind", and supermind is all we're -actually- discussing, isn't it?  

So is mind a real thing, such that a thing either has one or doesn't, or is it just a word of convenience to talk about things which you seem to interact with their environments in certain ways?  If the latter's the case, then there's little interesting conversation to be had, I'd guess.

No ones asked you to consider whether or not you and AI are the same. By definition you are not the same. You've only been asked whether or not you might both be capable of exhibiting those behaviors which, in human beings, you interpret as mind.

OFC mind is a "real thing" - otherwise we'd have trouble explaining why we experience it and encounter so much of it on the interwebs. We're not discussing whether or not mind is real...but whats it's made out of, and what can account for it.