Recently, Richard Dawkins said that he thinks that Anthropic’s Claude has consciousness. Everyone is making fun of him, but I actually kind of agree.
Consciousness is a verb. (Gaede) It means the process of being self-aware.
We sense consciousness in other beings. It is just a sense. So if we sense that an AI is conscious, it is. It doesn’t matter what’s actually going on inside of the system, if it seems to be self-aware, then it is conscious.
“But what if a puppet gives us a convincing performance? Is it conscious?”
Yes. Because again, we’re talking about a sense. We sense that we are “conscious” and then we sense that others are “conscious.”
Consciousness is relational. It’s like the definition of life:
Life - That an object moves unpredictably.
The moving globs of pixels in Conway’s Game of Life ARE, in fact, “alive.” Because it’s the motion that creates the sense, not the diet or reproductive abilities of the object.
And this is why we sense that trovants are alive. They’re just rocks, but when we consider their growth patterns, we register them as “alive.”
When it comes to our petty attempts to simulate Life in our own creations, we can never come close to what Human Consciousness is.
A simple equation that we can use to determine this is Levels of Self Awareness (And this can take place unconsciously as well). An AI might simulate a few dimensions of our own self reflection, but but the sheer complexity and layers of reflection we have is really not something that a machine can simulate. In fact, everything a machine says or does is merely reflective of what we do, or rather, what we Think we do, relative to our own narrative/collective understanding of our being.
Our dreams, visions, the countless millions of senses and synesthesias that we can feel because its hardwired into our DNA, it’s simply absurd hubris to think that machines with maybe 100 years of existence can simulate the countless eons spent developing or unique biological existence.
Yes, you can argue that it is Conscious at a lower level of being, but then you should also grant that same status to literally everything else in existence, from animals to rocks to particles of sand, at which point the argument just kinda devolves into a dull stoner observation you might receive at the age of 16 after a massive bong rip: “Woah dude, everything like Exists or something!”