To me it looks like the defining feature of consciousness intuition is one’s certainty in having it, so I define consciousness as the only thing one can be certain about and then I know I am conscious by executing “cogito ergo sum”.
I can imagine disabling specific features associated with awareness starting with memory: seeing something without remembering feels like seeing something and then forgetting about it. Usually when you don’t remember seeing something recent it means your perception wasn’t conscious, but you certainly forgot some conscious moments in the past.
Then I can imagine not having any thoughts. It is harder for long periods of time, but I can create short durations of just seeing that, as far as I remember, are not associated with any thoughts.
At that point it becomes harder to describe this process as self-awareness. You could argue that if there is representation of the lower level somewhere in the high level, then it is still modeling. But there is no more reason to consider these levels parts of the same system, than to consider any sender-receiver pair as self-modeling system.
I don’t know. It’s all ethics, so I’ll probably just check for some arbitrary similarity-to-human-mind metric.
we have reasons to expect such an agent to make any claim humans make
Depending on detailed definitions of “reflect on itself” and “model itself perceiving” I think you can make an agent that wouldn’t claim to be perfectly certain in its own consciousness. For example, I don’t see a reason why some simple cartesian agent with direct read-only access to its own code would think in terms of consciousness.
To me it looks like the defining feature of consciousness intuition is one’s certainty in having it, so I define consciousness as the only thing one can be certain about and then I know I am conscious by executing “cogito ergo sum”.
I can imagine disabling specific features associated with awareness starting with memory: seeing something without remembering feels like seeing something and then forgetting about it. Usually when you don’t remember seeing something recent it means your perception wasn’t conscious, but you certainly forgot some conscious moments in the past.
Then I can imagine not having any thoughts. It is harder for long periods of time, but I can create short durations of just seeing that, as far as I remember, are not associated with any thoughts.
At that point it becomes harder to describe this process as self-awareness. You could argue that if there is representation of the lower level somewhere in the high level, then it is still modeling. But there is no more reason to consider these levels parts of the same system, than to consider any sender-receiver pair as self-modeling system.
I don’t know. It’s all ethics, so I’ll probably just check for some arbitrary similarity-to-human-mind metric.
Depending on detailed definitions of “reflect on itself” and “model itself perceiving” I think you can make an agent that wouldn’t claim to be perfectly certain in its own consciousness. For example, I don’t see a reason why some simple cartesian agent with direct read-only access to its own code would think in terms of consciousness.