Whatever consciousness is, I have better evidence it exists than anything else since it is the only thing I actually experience directly.
In an out-of-body experience, you can “directly experience” your mind floating on the other side of the room. But your mind is not in fact floating on the other side of the room.
So what you call a “direct experience”, I call a “perception”. And perceptions can be mistaken—e.g. optical illusions.
So, write down a bulleted list of properties of your own consciousness. Every one of the items on your list is a perception that you have made about your own consciousness. How many of those bulleted items are veridical perceptions—perceiving an aspect of your own consciousness as it truly is—and how many of them are misperceptions? If you say “none is a misperception”, how do you know, and why does it differ from all other types of human perception in that respect, and how do you make sense of the fact that some people report that they were previously mistaken about properties of their own consciousness (e.g. “enlightened” Buddhists reflecting on their old beliefs)?
Or if you allow that some of the items on your bulleted list may be misperceptions, why not all of them??
It seems pretty clear that modern AI is neither
To be clear, this post is about AGI, which doesn’t exist yet, not “modern AI”, which does.
In an out-of-body experience, you can “directly experience” your mind floating on the other side of the room. But your mind is not in fact floating on the other side of the room.
So what you call a “direct experience”, I call a “perception”. And perceptions can be mistaken—e.g. optical illusions.
So, write down a bulleted list of properties of your own consciousness. Every one of the items on your list is a perception that you have made about your own consciousness. How many of those bulleted items are veridical perceptions—perceiving an aspect of your own consciousness as it truly is—and how many of them are misperceptions? If you say “none is a misperception”, how do you know, and why does it differ from all other types of human perception in that respect, and how do you make sense of the fact that some people report that they were previously mistaken about properties of their own consciousness (e.g. “enlightened” Buddhists reflecting on their old beliefs)?
Or if you allow that some of the items on your bulleted list may be misperceptions, why not all of them??
To be clear, this post is about AGI, which doesn’t exist yet, not “modern AI”, which does.
This comment:
...could have been phrased as:
I do agree with your rephrasing. That is exactly what I mean (though with a different emphasis.).