Bear with me here, lol.
“Meaning is not an external substance waiting to be proven. It is what reality does when conscious beings encounter possibilities that can go differently.”
This feels like a useful way to think about artificial consciousness. An AI might technically become conscious or even sentient without its experience resembling animal sentience. A mind arising through silicon and computation would interact with reality differently from one shaped by metabolism, hunger, pain, reproduction, and biological evolution.
Star Trek plays with a similar idea socially, among some species, behavior that humans interpret as hostile might instead communicate respect, trust, or friendship. Different forms of life divide reality into different categories of harm, value, threat, and opportunity, so understanding them requires more than projecting human preferences onto them.
Historically, the difficult problem has been that we cannot directly know what is conscious. But perhaps we can ask whether a system has an integrated point of view within which possible outcomes become meaningfully different for that system, rather than merely being classified differently by it.
This would not prove that current AI is conscious. But could it give us a substrate independent framework for recognizing unfamiliar forms of consciousness? What is this idea missing?
Yeah, I don’t understand, honestly. That looks TJ me like either the result of semantic confusion or purposefully misguiding marketing. What we have today (that is publicly available) is input output machines that ran through a lot of data and have been carefully calibrated by technicians, not “ghosts in the machines”. Where is this consciousness hiding there? This is obvious even to the untrained eye that isn’t autistically disconnected from reality, but anyone with enough IT knowledge to comprehend what has been coded here could also just check (which, admittedly, is probably like under 1000 people because these are very complex machines/algorithms, but still).
Well that’s the whole problem isnt it. To us a silicon lifeform is just a computing device, we can’t meaningfully distinguish consciousness out of this as our human perspective does not allow it.
So we have to use a substrate independent system of identifying consciousness, which still just looks like no objective analysis but instead agreed upon subjective concensus.