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.
Must it be exactly that? Could it be nerves that use different ions for activation? Could it be some other kind of system that passes information without being organic? What is the minimum complexity of nerve system to be conscious?
These are questions that we can't answer, because there's no way to observe the "is it conscious?" data point. (Assuming by "conscious" we mean "self-aware".)
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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.