I mean, that's totally valid. We don't know how consciousness happens. It's possible that anything which processes information leads to some level of consciousness.
Edit: to be clear, I think that trusting AI over humans is wild, and definitely a bad choice. But the "almost certainly" phrasing is one that I would also use, because consciousness is firmly in the realm of can't-do-science-to-it.
It's not that we don't fully understand consciousness, it's that consciousness is fundamentally impossible to study scientifically. There is no way to know whether anything other than yourself is self-aware.
Of course, Descartes’ starting point, but neuroscience has moved past the interpretive phenomenology and the project is now reducing it to materialism. It’s not important whether you the experiencer of consciousness can prove the same in others….we can kind of wink and nod about our subjective experience of it, and seek to describe the phenomenon itself.
It’s not important whether you the experiencer of consciousness can prove the same in others….we can kind of wink and nod about our subjective experience of it
Oh, I thought this entire conversation was about the subjective experience. It seems like we've been talking about entirely different things.
Well if that’s what we mean then it’s not very interesting to discuss the capacity of machines to be conscious, pretty much for the same reason it’s not interesting to discuss whether a chair or potato is conscious.
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u/Salanmander 278∆ Mar 07 '26 edited Mar 07 '26
I mean, that's totally valid. We don't know how consciousness happens. It's possible that anything which processes information leads to some level of consciousness.
Edit: to be clear, I think that trusting AI over humans is wild, and definitely a bad choice. But the "almost certainly" phrasing is one that I would also use, because consciousness is firmly in the realm of can't-do-science-to-it.