Article How can we know that an animal, or AI, is conscious?

[C C]

https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/...-conscious

EXCERPTS: Consciousness is a private affair. There is no way of directly knowing what it is like to be another. We can only infer. And we readily do infer that others have conscious experiences like we do, for essentially three kinds of reasons:

(1) they act like me

(2) they look like me

(3) they tell me

So when, say, your mother smiles and says she is happy, you are probably pretty confident that she is — even if it may not be true. Making inferences about nonhuman animals involves even more uncertainty as we can only rely on reasons (1) and (2).

[...] But of course it is worth keeping in mind that our attributing consciousness in no way changes the reality of whether another entity actually has consciousness. GPT4 maintains that AI “can mimic aspects of consciousness, but mimicry is not equivalent to genuine experience”.

A version of this was published as part of a collection about consciousness beyond the human case in Current Biology..... (MORE - details)

[Magical Realist]

"The application of machine learning to natural language processing achieves the imitation of consciousness, not consciousness itself, and it is not science fiction. It is now."

With the growing prospect of the eventual emergence of artificial consciousness from AI comes the equally staggering possibility of virtual personhood. It's not a concept all that foreign to us. Characters in books and plays and movies are all familiar examples of virtual persons--beings we experience empathically and empirically to be real people but who are lacking any real consciousness or selfness of their own. When the actor plays a character well in a movie, say like Tom Hanks' Forest Gump, clearly it is only a scripted and purely imitative performance of that character as if they were a real spontaneous and experiencing person.

With the advent of AI-generated virtual persons now looming on the horizon, it will become even easier to "suspend our disbelief" and experience them as living conscious persons thru our real time interaction with them. We will bond with them intimately, just as we all already roughly do with babies and pets and the people in our dreams.

But it poses a troubling question to us all: is not our own conscious personhood just a social construct, a role we are so accustomed to playing to an audience that it seems to us totally real and genuine? Maybe so. Perhaps in the end we are all virtual persons, never daring to "break character". But then again, what else is there for us to be?

https://lithub.com/the-imitation-of-cons...rocessing/

[Magical Realist]

"The application of machine learning to natural language processing achieves the imitation of consciousness, not consciousness itself, and it is not science fiction. It is now."

With the growing prospect of the eventual emergence of artificial consciousness from AI comes the equally staggering possibility of virtual personhood. It's not a concept all that foreign to us. Characters in books and plays and movies are all familiar examples of virtual persons--beings we experience empathically and empirically to be real people but who are lacking any real consciousness or selfness of their own. When the actor plays a character well in a movie, say like Tom Hanks' Forest Gump, clearly it is only a scripted and purely imitative performance of that character as if they were a real spontaneous and experiencing person.

With the advent of AI-generated virtual persons now looming on the horizon, it will become even easier to "suspend our disbelief" and experience them as living conscious persons thru our real time interaction with them. We will bond with them intimately, just as we all already roughly do with babies and pets and the people in our dreams.

But it poses a troubling question to us all: is not our own conscious personhood just a social construct, a role we are so accustomed to playing to an audience that it seems to us totally real and genuine? Maybe so. Perhaps in the end we are all virtual persons, never daring to "break character". But then again, what else is there for us to be?

https://lithub.com/the-imitation-of-cons...rocessing/

“It would be nice to begin the journey with who we are. But "who we are" is a house of mirrors, a tangled knot, a great and terrible Oz that in the final analysis may consist of nothing more than, well, nothing. The self, I am afraid, may be more of an onion than a fruit, and "who we are" is the skin we shed.”
― Erik Davis

[Syne]

Even if you believe that consciousness and free will are only illusions of a deterministic system, there is a point of internalization that has to occur. The prompts we give AI to make it seem conscious would have to somehow originate internally.

I haven't seen anyone theorize on how we make that leap.