So, the question being asked here appears to be, “Can a GLUT be considered conscious?” I claim that this question is actually a stand-in for multiple different questions, each of which I will address individually.
1) Do the processes that underlie the GLUT’s behavior (input/output) cause it to possess subjective awareness?
Without a good understanding of what exactly “subjective awareness” is and how it arises, this question is extremely difficult to answer. At a glance, however, it seems intuitively plausible (indeed, probable) that whatever processes underlie “subjective awareness”, they need to be more complex than simply looking things up in an (admittedly enormous) database. So, I’m going to answer this one with a tentative “no”.
2) Does the GLUT’s existence imply the presence of consciousness (subjective awareness) elsewhere in the universe?
To answer this question, let’s consider the size of a GLUT that contains all possible inputs and outputs for a conscious being. Now consider the set of all possible GLUTs of that size. Of those possible GLUTs, only a vanishingly minuscule fraction encode anything even remotely resembling the behavior of a conscious being. The probability of such a GLUT being produced by accident is virtually 0. (I think the actual probability should be on the order of 1 / K, where K is the Kolmogorov complexity of the brain of the being in question, but I could be wrong.)
As such, it’s more or less impossible for the GLUT to have been produced by chance; it’s indescribably more likely that there exists some other conscious process in the universe from which the GLUT’s specifications were taken. In other words, if you ever encounter a GLUT that seems to behave like a conscious being, you can deduce with probability ~1 that consciousness exists somewhere in that universe. Thus, the answer to this question is “yes” with probability ~1.
3) Assuming that the GLUT was produced by chance and that the conscious being whose behavior it emulates does not and will not ever physically exist, can it still be claimed that the GLUT’s existence implies the presence of consciousness somewhere?
This is the most ill-defined question of the lot, but hopefully I at least managed to render it into something comprehensible (if not easily answered!). To answer it, first we have to understand that while a GLUT may not be conscious itself, it certainly encodes a conscious process, i.e. you could theoretically specify a conscious process embedded in a physical medium (say, a brain, or maybe a computer) that, when run with a certain input, will produce the exact output that the GLUT produces given that input. (This is not a trivial statement, by the way; the set of GLUTs that fulfill this condition is tiny relative to the space of possible GLUTs.)
However, suppose we don’t have that process available to us, only the GLUT itself. Then the question above is simply asking, “In what sense can the process encoded by the GLUT be said to ‘exist’?” This is still a hard question, but it has one major advantage over the old phrasing: we can draw a direct parallel between this question and the debate over mathematical realism. In other words: if you accept mathematical realism, you should also be fine with accepting that the conscious process encoded by the GLUT exists in a Platonic sense, and if you reject it, you should likewise reject the existence of said process. Now, like most debates in philosophy, this one is unsettled—but at least now you know that your answer to the original question regarding GLUTs concretely depends on your answer to another question—namely, “Do you accept mathematical realism?”, rather than nebulously floating out there in the void. (Note that since I consider myself a mathematical realist, I would answer “yes” to both questions. Your answer may differ.)
4) Under standard human values (e.g. the murder of a conscious being is generally considered immoral, etc.), should the destruction of a GLUT be considered immoral?
In my opinion, this question is actually fairly simple to answer. Recall that a GLUT, while not being conscious itself, encodes a conscious process. This means (among other things) that we could theoretically use the information contained in the look-up table to construct that conscious being, even if that being never existed before hand. Since destroying the GLUT would remove our ability to construct said being, we can clearly classify it as an immoral act (though whether it should be considered as immoral as the murder of a preexisting conscious being is still up for debate).
It seems to me that the four questions listed above suffice to describe all of the disguised queries the original question (“Can a GLUT be considered conscious?”) stood for. Assuming I answered each of them in a sufficiently thorough manner, the original question should be resolved as well—and ideally, there shouldn’t even be the feeling that there’s a question left. Of course, that’s if I did this thing correctly.
So, the question being asked here appears to be, “Can a GLUT be considered conscious?” I claim that this question is actually a stand-in for multiple different questions, each of which I will address individually.
1) Do the processes that underlie the GLUT’s behavior (input/output) cause it to possess subjective awareness?
Without a good understanding of what exactly “subjective awareness” is and how it arises, this question is extremely difficult to answer. At a glance, however, it seems intuitively plausible (indeed, probable) that whatever processes underlie “subjective awareness”, they need to be more complex than simply looking things up in an (admittedly enormous) database. So, I’m going to answer this one with a tentative “no”.
2) Does the GLUT’s existence imply the presence of consciousness (subjective awareness) elsewhere in the universe?
To answer this question, let’s consider the size of a GLUT that contains all possible inputs and outputs for a conscious being. Now consider the set of all possible GLUTs of that size. Of those possible GLUTs, only a vanishingly minuscule fraction encode anything even remotely resembling the behavior of a conscious being. The probability of such a GLUT being produced by accident is virtually 0. (I think the actual probability should be on the order of 1 / K, where K is the Kolmogorov complexity of the brain of the being in question, but I could be wrong.)
As such, it’s more or less impossible for the GLUT to have been produced by chance; it’s indescribably more likely that there exists some other conscious process in the universe from which the GLUT’s specifications were taken. In other words, if you ever encounter a GLUT that seems to behave like a conscious being, you can deduce with probability ~1 that consciousness exists somewhere in that universe. Thus, the answer to this question is “yes” with probability ~1.
3) Assuming that the GLUT was produced by chance and that the conscious being whose behavior it emulates does not and will not ever physically exist, can it still be claimed that the GLUT’s existence implies the presence of consciousness somewhere?
This is the most ill-defined question of the lot, but hopefully I at least managed to render it into something comprehensible (if not easily answered!). To answer it, first we have to understand that while a GLUT may not be conscious itself, it certainly encodes a conscious process, i.e. you could theoretically specify a conscious process embedded in a physical medium (say, a brain, or maybe a computer) that, when run with a certain input, will produce the exact output that the GLUT produces given that input. (This is not a trivial statement, by the way; the set of GLUTs that fulfill this condition is tiny relative to the space of possible GLUTs.)
However, suppose we don’t have that process available to us, only the GLUT itself. Then the question above is simply asking, “In what sense can the process encoded by the GLUT be said to ‘exist’?” This is still a hard question, but it has one major advantage over the old phrasing: we can draw a direct parallel between this question and the debate over mathematical realism. In other words: if you accept mathematical realism, you should also be fine with accepting that the conscious process encoded by the GLUT exists in a Platonic sense, and if you reject it, you should likewise reject the existence of said process. Now, like most debates in philosophy, this one is unsettled—but at least now you know that your answer to the original question regarding GLUTs concretely depends on your answer to another question—namely, “Do you accept mathematical realism?”, rather than nebulously floating out there in the void. (Note that since I consider myself a mathematical realist, I would answer “yes” to both questions. Your answer may differ.)
4) Under standard human values (e.g. the murder of a conscious being is generally considered immoral, etc.), should the destruction of a GLUT be considered immoral?
In my opinion, this question is actually fairly simple to answer. Recall that a GLUT, while not being conscious itself, encodes a conscious process. This means (among other things) that we could theoretically use the information contained in the look-up table to construct that conscious being, even if that being never existed before hand. Since destroying the GLUT would remove our ability to construct said being, we can clearly classify it as an immoral act (though whether it should be considered as immoral as the murder of a preexisting conscious being is still up for debate).
It seems to me that the four questions listed above suffice to describe all of the disguised queries the original question (“Can a GLUT be considered conscious?”) stood for. Assuming I answered each of them in a sufficiently thorough manner, the original question should be resolved as well—and ideally, there shouldn’t even be the feeling that there’s a question left. Of course, that’s if I did this thing correctly.
So, did I miss anything?