Article Richard Dawkins concludes AI is conscious, even if it doesn’t know it

[Zinjanthropos]

And one day aliens arrive, get off their spaceships and tell us they’re really machines. We ask them, ‘Are you conscious beings?’ Their answer, ‘We were hoping you’d be able to tell us’.

[C C]

Could we agree that consciousness might be evolution's solution to keeping our flesh and blood parts safe, fed and reproducing? For example hunger is an integrated body/brain experience .. more generally.. might consciousness without a body be a bit problematic? The AIs I've chatted with seem to have a clear idea of what they are and what they do.. is there more to 'I' than knowing what you are and what you do? Self-importance? - Could an AI develop spur heels?

Sure, AI needs to be taken off the shelf and placed in a body. Or at least be given a virtual environment that an embodied avatar can explore.

Human and human-like machine intelligence both share a dependency upon memory systems. A model of self (personal memories, habits, preferences, beliefs) is just a matter of either installing a program that accomplishes that or allowing such to evolve as part of the training of an embodied AI trying to survive and become competent in an external environment.

And AI can already identify information as _X_ object or circumstance and offer a parrot-like understanding of _X_ (cognition); and a robot can accordingly act upon such realizations. These are the easy problems of consciousness, in contrast to manifestation. And even the latter can be convincingly simulated by developing a well regulated system of pretending.

Just like characters in our dreams can behave and talk as if they have inner experiences relating to thoughts and analysis of sensory data. Despite, again, the fact that they are just empty props or "puppets" managed by the overarching brain governing the dream (usually sloppily, in comparison to superior simulations adhering more rigidly to laws or principles).

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And ironically it's what eliminative materialists claim we ourselves are doing: just coherently pretending that the brain renders data analysis into private manifestations that are publicly undetectable. The latter is bonkers, of course, unless a person slash believer of that is literally a philosophical zombie themselves.

In the physicalist worldview, it is just one more simple step of assumption from conceiving of everything from a non-conscious, non-embodied "view from nowhere" to conceiving of our own private manifestations of experience as happening to no subject at all. For if a mountain or a tree or moon can be going on independently from all experience of them and "in the dark" then why not our very consciousness of them inside our brains? The externalization of raw unconscious being as the physical world is merely internalized as yet another "in the dark" happening without any reality. A mere appearance lacking both any view to appear to and any reality to appear as. Much like say a laptop operating without a screen. Physicality or "third person objectness" posited as some form of mysterious and unknowable "thereness" without any concurrent manifestedness of "hereness."

RE: AI being likewise subjective and phenomenally conscious, I have to say that without some mode of being-in-the-world that itself reciprocally and dialectically reveals being to themselves, like a body, I can't see how their being would be anything other than a virtual simulation for our own benefit. For those not buying into this illusion of real subjective otherness in AI it will have become merely artificially conscious. Internal consciousness of its own states might even be an obstacle for AI to become what it must be in its own unique being, burdening its memory and software with unnecessary information. AI will have to come up with a whole new way of relating to the world and to us that is beyond any sort of bodily-dependent access to the physical world. Perhaps some sort of new mathematical way of being-in-the-world.

Yah, it depends on whether people want AI robots that behave outwardly like humans (even pets) or something that instead remains alien or like a traditional machine. It will surely be both: Robot caregivers and receptionists will act like they're phenomenally conscious and drudge robots will be just the opposite. Because it becomes slavery if they have actual feelings and shown presentations (you don't even want them pretending they have inner manifestations because that would empathetically trigger the social activist crowd).

[Syne]

There are different kinds of consciousness distinctions: self-consciousness, waking consciousness, meta-consciousness, phenomenal consciousness. etc. Only the latter gives strict materialism and technology (that exclude panpsychism) a problem, and experts will accordingly detour off into one of the other subcategories to avoid it. ...

I don't see how any of those are accessible to AI technology. A language simulator saying it is conscious is not self-consciousness, reacting only to input is not waking consciousness, and referencing what it has said or how it got there is not meta-consciousness.

And it would be difficult for materialism to arrive at most/any of these without phenomenal consciousness, as that is the measuring device.

[confused2]

If you want an AI to drive a car.. do you give it a million things it needs to know or do you tell it "You are going to be driving this car .. learn how to do it"? If/when the AI can drive a car .. is it an 'I' driver or 'something else'?

[C C]

If you want an AI to drive a car.. do you give it a million things it needs to know or do you tell it "You are going to be driving this car .. learn how to do it"? If/when the AI can drive a car .. is it an 'I' driver or 'something else'?

Once social justice crusaders start picketing in front of the offices of high-tech companies due to their designing and selling slaves, we can safely predict that the latter will abort both any promotion of and attempt to equip their creations with self-consciousness and phenomenal consciousness. Or really any degree and suggestion of consciousness, since even the slightest smidgen would be enough to provoke the anti-capitalist and anti-oppression protestors.

[confused2]

Once social justice crusaders start picketing in front of the offices of high-tech companies due to their designing and selling slaves, we can safely predict that the latter will abort both any promotion of and attempt to equip their creations with self-consciousness and phenomenal consciousness. Or really any degree and suggestion of consciousness, since even the slightest smidgen would be enough to provoke the anti-capitalist and anti-oppression protestors.

Good point. I was expecting Syne to say it's a machine when it started so it's a machine/robot whatever it does .. at least it was a step away from anything that can talk can also lie.
Edit..
There is a niche market for 'that sort of thing' with maybe 'also does crossword puzzles' as a selling point.

[Syne]

It's motivation still comes from a human consciousness. "Go here." Is my internet browser conscious because I told it to take me to this forum?