This is part of the problem. We don't have a consistent definition for consciousness anymore than we have a definition for AGI. (AGI can, by reading the instructions, build flat-packed furniture, or make coffee, but would a bot that could do these things be AGI?)

We assume the people we talk to are conscious, but then they could be Turing complete bots, or a Chinese room, or a p-zombie. You've essentially argued that you cannot demonstrate to us that you are actually conscious, only that you seem so convincingly.

Similarly, if I were to argue that I'm not conscious, but an advanced iteration of an AI program practicing speaking from a private lab in Sacramento California, and in fact, have no life beyond going online and pretending to be a person, you'd have no way of establishing this as true or false.

So appealing to consciousness is useless on account that we can't actually say what it is. Again, we don't have any edge cases of anything that is nearly conscious and appears to be, but isn't, or something that is conscious but only barely. We assume that anything we can engage as human is, often leading to peculiar results like Sophia, the Robot-yet-Saudi-citizen that isn't even convincingly sophisticated.

I'd argue that we want to be more than a material chain reaction, to the point that we're frightened of considering the bare minimums that we would need to be to be convincingly ourselves.

[–] nifty 1 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago)

We assume the people we talk to are conscious, but then they could be Turing complete bots, or a Chinese room, or a p-zombie. You’ve essentially argued that you cannot demonstrate to us that you are actually conscious, only that you seem so convincingly.

Right, except non digital beings have different modes of interactions with universe. In fact, more than that a key difference is that conscious beings impose themselves on the universe in an effort to self propagate. While we’re just interacting digitally, I cannot ensure anything, but that by itself doesn’t mean anything.

I am not sure of anything, but I dislike reading the same ideas that don’t seem to add up as far as I am concerned shrug

Again, we don’t have any edge cases of anything that is nearly conscious and appears to be, but isn’t, or something that is conscious but only barely

But we do, people in comas for example. They maintain personality and memory after persistent unconscious periods, which differentiates them from both unconscious organisms, and also precludes the reconstruction hypothesis.