Comment by galaxytachyon | Hacker News Reader

Comment by galaxytachyon | Hacker News Reader

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I talked about this sometime ago with another person. But at what point do we stop associating things with consciousness? Most people consider the brain is the seat of all that you are. But we also know how much the environment affect our "selves". Sunlight, food, temperature, other people, education, external knowledge, they all contribute quite significantly to your consciousness. Going the opposite way, religious people may disagree and say the soul is what actually you and nothing else matters.

We can't even decide how much, and of what, would constitute a person. If like you said, the best AI right now is just a portion of the language processing part of our brain, it still can be sentient.

Not that I think LLMs are anything close to people or AGI. But the fact is that we can't concretely and absolutely refute AI sentience based on our current knowledge. The technology deserves respect and deep thoughts instead of dismissing it as "glorified autocomplete". Nature needed billions of years to go from inert chemicals to sentience. We went from vacuum tubes to something resembling it in less than a century. Where can it go in the next century?

A dead brain isn't conscious, most agree with that. But all the neural connections are still there, so you could inspect those and probably calculate what the human would respond to things, but I think the human is still dead even if you can now "talk" to him.

Interesting to think about how we do use our mental models of people to predict how they would respond to things even after they're gone.

I believe consciousness exists on a sliding scale, so maybe sentience should too. This begs the question: at what point is something sentient/conscious enough that rights and ethics come into play? A "sliding scale of rights" sounds a little dubious and hard to pin down.

Not to get too political, but since you mention rights it’s already political…

This is practically the same conversation many places are having about abortion. The difference is that we know a human egg eventually becomes a human, we just can’t agree when.

It raises other, even more troubling questions IMO:

"What is the distribution of human consciousness?"

"How do the most conscious virtual models compare to the least conscious humans?"

"If the most conscious virtual models are more conscious than the least conscious humans... should the virtual models have more rights? Should the humans have fewer? A mix of both?"

Replace AI with chickens or cows in those questions and they become questions that have disturbed many of us for a long time already.

>This begs the question: at what point is something sentient/conscious enough that rights and ethics come into play?

At no objective point. Rights and ethics are a social constract, and as such can be given (and taken away from) some elite, a few people, most people, or even rocks and lizzards.

Can we even refute that a rock is conscious? That philosophical zombies are possible? Does consciousness have any experimental basis beyond that we all say we feel it?

>Can we even refute that a rock is conscious?

Yes, unless we stretch the definition of conscious most people use beyond recognition.

At that point, though, it will be so remote from what we use the term for, that it could just be any random term, like doskoulard!

"Can we even refute that a rock is doskoulard?"

What definition would that be? What falsifiable definition of consciousness is even possible?

Let's go with the dictionary one for starters: "the state of being aware of and responsive to one's surroundings.".

The rock is neither "aware" nor "responsive". It just stands there. It's a non-reactive set of minerals, lacking not just any capacity to react, but also life.

Though that's overthinking it. Sometimes you don't need decicated testing equipment to know something, just common sense.

Consciousness and responsiveness are orthogonal. Your dictionary would define the locked-in victims of apparently vegetative states as nonconscious. They are not.

Common sense is valuable, but it has a mixed scientific track record.

>Your dictionary would define the locked-in victims of apparently vegetative states as nonconscious

You can always find small exceptions to everything. But you know what I mean.

Except if your point is that, like the vegetative victims, the rock's brain is still alive.

Ackchyually, this is bigoted against all the electrons inside that rock. Subatomic particles deserve rights too! /s

Any definition for anything is tautologically true if you ignore exceptions

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