“Counsciousness” is the ultimate moving goalpost, and historically, it’s been one of humanity’s most effective intellectual weapons. An indefinable black box we intentionally gatekeep to draw an arbitrary line between ‘us’ and ‘them’.

I don’t know if AI is conscious or not, and I honestly don’t know what it even means to be conscious. historically, by claiming a monopoly on it, we’ve successfully manufactured the philosophical cover to exploit animals, subjugate other cultures, and appoint ourselves the top spot of the cosmic hierarchy guilt-free.

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energy123 2 hours ago | parent | next [-]

The only reason I care about animal welfare is because I think they're probably conscious, capable of feeling fear and pain.

	▲	layer8 2 hours ago \| parent \| next [-]
		While I agree that this is the case for many animals, I would say that consciousness and emotions are two largely orthogonal things. Certainly consciousness is conceivable without emotions, and having emotions without consciousness also seems plausible. You can have fear and distressing pain without a reflective awareness of being a self with those feelings.
	▲	H8crilA 2 hours ago \| parent \| prev \| next [-]
		Yes, that is the definition of consciousness (you care about them).
	▲	2 hours ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		[deleted]

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drfloyd51 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

If we understand how a system “emulates” consciousness then we declare it an emulation. If we don’t quite understand how a system exhibits consciousness then we can say it might be conscious.

Basically, we need to leave room for the universal answer (God) to fit into the definition.

If we ever scientifically figure out how consciousness arises in our brains, I think we will have a bunch of very depressed people on our hands. If the truth isn’t met with flat out hostile denial. I fear any answer that doesn’t leave room for God will be rejected.

Since we have the source code to AI, and thus a Godless understanding of how it works, AI will NEVER be deemed “conscious”.

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altcognito 2 hours ago | parent | next [-]

I think that Jimmy Carr has it right: AI is the fourth great humiliation.

Regardless of whether something is concious, we're not going to be (by lay definition) the smartest entity on earth.

https://www.youtube.com/shorts/gRgoIVnjkVU

	▲	ux266478 23 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		Human beings sometimes get outsmarted by predators. It's certainly a strange thing to take pride in intelligence as an inviolable absolute.

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famouswaffles 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

>and thus a Godless understanding of how it works

We don't even have that much. Though, some people certainly think they do.

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horacemorace 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

This doesn’t make sense at all.

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gobdovan 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

> I honestly don’t know what it even means to be conscious

> subjugate other cultures (assuming you mean they're not conscious in other's minds)

Have you ever considered you might be a philosophical zombie? [0]

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philosophical_zombie

	▲	speak_plainly 2 hours ago \| parent [-]
		I can live with that.

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suddenlybananas 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Can you give some historical examples of people moving the goalposts around consciousness? I agree, perhaps, for aspects of "intelligence" but I can't think of any examples of it with regard to consciousness proper.

	▲	speak_plainly an hour ago \| parent [-]
		There’s over 400 years of philosophical debate about consciousness starting with Locke, shifting with Kant, and continuing onward with real world implications throughout. By some more modern definitions an iPhone has consciousness while others explicitly exclude certain humans, and these definitions served as part of the justification of slavery and sexism, colonialism and more. I started writing an essay on this on my phone in response and I gave up there are so many examples. To name a few you may want to investigate: John Locke, Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, Immanuel Kant, David Hume, G.W.F. Hegel, Arthur Schopenhauer, William James, Edmund Husserl, Sigmund Freud, Thomas Nagel, Ned Block, David Chalmers, Giulio Tononi, René Descartes, Daniel Dennett, Julian Jaynes, Michael Graziano, T.H. Huxley, Otto Weininger, Simone de Beauvoir, Jean-Paul Sartre, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, John Searle, Christof Koch, Bernard Baars, Max Velmans, Victor Lamme, Stanislas Dehaene, Antonio Damasio, Anil Seth, Peter Godfrey-Smith, Galen Strawson, Philip Goff, Colin McGinn, Patricia Churchland, Paul Churchland, Frank Jackson, Jerry Fodor, John Stuart Mill, Wilhelm Wundt, Franz Brentano, Carl Jung, Jacques Lacan, Michel Foucault.