I’d say my visualization of consciousness is less like a typical steam engine or table, and more like a Rube Goldberg machine designed by a very confused committee of terrible engineers. You can remove some parts of the machine without breaking anything, but a lot of other parts are necessary for the thing to work.
It should also be possible to design an AI that has ‘human-like consciousness’ via a much less kludge-ish process—I don’t think that much complexity is morally essential.
But chickens were built by a confused committee just like humans were, so they’ll have their own enormous intricate kludges (which may or may not be the same kind of machine as the Consciousness Machine in our heads), rather than having the really efficient small version of the consciousness-machine.
I’d say my visualization of consciousness is less like a typical steam engine or table, and more like a Rube Goldberg machine designed by a very confused committee of terrible engineers. You can remove some parts of the machine without breaking anything, but a lot of other parts are necessary for the thing to work.
It should also be possible to design an AI that has ‘human-like consciousness’ via a much less kludge-ish process—I don’t think that much complexity is morally essential.
But chickens were built by a confused committee just like humans were, so they’ll have their own enormous intricate kludges (which may or may not be the same kind of machine as the Consciousness Machine in our heads), rather than having the really efficient small version of the consciousness-machine.