With that said, I've been thinking that consciousness is just mystery.
There's so much about the brain we don't know. Within that mystery, humans can read in all sorts of things. So we are conscious.
Machines are not a mystery. We made them, it's just numbers. They are not conscious.
If an AI can pull a confidence trick, I'm not sure what the qualitative difference is. "Chinese Room" problem, I guess? If the physical results are all we are able to compare, how do we define artificial vs real consciousness?
Atoms aren't a mystery. We know all the relevant laws of physics. No known law of physics could possibly lead to consciousness. Consciousness might as well be magic from the point of view of modern science.
Numbers versus atoms, what's the difference? Machines could certainly be conscious, by some weird, "magical" process. Maybe it is a crude, unrecognizable kind of consciousness, that turns on and off with the electricity.
But, given how we understand essentially nothing of where consciousness comes from, how can we possibly claim that it can never arise from just numbers?
With that said, I've been thinking that consciousness is just mystery.
There's so much about the brain we don't know. Within that mystery, humans can read in all sorts of things. So we are conscious.
Machines are not a mystery. We made them, it's just numbers. They are not conscious.
If an AI can pull a confidence trick, I'm not sure what the qualitative difference is. "Chinese Room" problem, I guess? If the physical results are all we are able to compare, how do we define artificial vs real consciousness?