> Whether AI is conscious or not is independent of the social acceptance of the idea, unless you believe in thoroughly discredited and quite radical forms of social constructionism.

Yet all science is social, until you convince other people to take your ideas seriously, you are just another crank/loony.

How is social constructionism thoroughly discredited? Wikipedia shows some people poking with nits that don't look serious to me at all.

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orbital-decay 12 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Science has little to do with consciousness. If it can't even be defined without using immeasurable concepts like "intentionality" then it's subject to arbitrary interpretation.

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D-Machine 20 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Radical or hard or global social constructionism [1] (or perhaps more accurately radical/hard/global relativism about truth [2]) are discredited because both are manifestly incoherent and prevent any serious thought from being possible, since they amount to a total denial of the existence of any kind of observer- or society-independent reality, i.e. they devolve to a solipsism of some form. Solipsism is not a coherent (or workable, at least) worldview, so can safely dismissed.

It is hard to provide a citation for these points because these points are so philosophically obvious that few waste time spelling them out, but searching for "hard/global constructionism" or "hard/global relativism" (on e.g. Google Scholar), or asking an AI about problems with these views I hope will make it clear why they are dumb, if it isn't already obvious to you.

Soft forms are of course totally fine. But to say "conscious is only and exactly whatever we say it to be" is hard constructionism / relativism, so completely unserious. Very obviously there are aspects of consciousness that do not merely depend on what we believe or say about it, even if some social constructionist aspects are also involved.

[1] https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/social-construction-natur...

[2] https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/relativism/#RelAboTruAleR...

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orbital-decay 11 hours ago | parent [-]

I'm starting to think that your condescending "go ask a chatbot" is not intended as an insult to imaginary annoying AI bros unable to comprehend High Matters That Have Been Definitely Solved Once And For All By Those Smart People In A Self-Evident Manner but is sincere in that you believe an LLM can say something new in this discussion.

The statement that consciousness is subjective and should and will be interpreted does not lead to hardcore social constructionism nor does it lead to solipsism, sorry this doesn't make any sense. It looks way more probable that it contradicts your hard beliefs that don't need proof. If you believe consciousness is objective and exists independently of your beliefs then you can give a rigorous definition of it that doesn't rely on arbitrarily chosen vague concepts like "dynamic flow" and "intentionality", and a way to measure it. It doesn't have to be binary, I don't think anyone here has any problem dealing with multidimensional concept closeness mathematically.

	▲	D-Machine 11 hours ago \| parent [-]
		I am telling you to ask a chatbot because you are saying things so hilariously philosophically incompetent and ignorant that even a retarded LLM will improve your thinking. You obviously don't care about thinking coherently though, or can't even recognize what coherent thought looks like (mainly because you seem to think something along the lines of "my few minutes of armchair reflections prove all philosophy is vague and retarded"), so this is clearly a waste of time. I will not be engaging further.