this post was submitted on 28 Feb 2025
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The author engages in magical thinking. Our consciousness is a product of the physical processes occurring within our brains, specifically it's encoded in the patterns of neuron firings. We know this to be the case because we can observe direct impact on the conscious process when the brain is stimulated. For example, a few milligrams of a psychadelic drug can profoundly change the conscious experience.
Given that the conscious process is a result of an underlying physical process, it follows that these patterns could be expressed on a different substrate. There is absolutely no basis for the notion that an AI could not be conscious. In fact, there's every reason to believe that it would be if its underlying patterns mirrored those of a biological brain.
The fact that our consciousness can be mapped onto physical states doesn't mean it can be reduced to it. You can map the movement of the sun with a sundial and the shadow it generates, but there's no giant ball of ongoing nuclear fusion in any shadow, even though one requires the other.
I think you're slightly strawmanning Yogthos
That's precisely what it means actually. Consciousness is a direct byproduct of physical activity in the brain. It doesn't come from some magic dimension. Meanwhile, the analogy you've made makes a huge assumption that high level patterns are inherently dependent on the underlying complexity of the substrate. There is no evidence to support this notion. For example, while our computers don't work the same way our brains do, it is a fact that silicon chips are physical things that are made of complex materials, are subject to quantum effects, and so on. Yet, none of that underlying complexity is relevant to the software running on those chips. How do we know this? Because we can make a virtual machine that can implement the patterns expressed on the chip without modelling all the physical workings of the chip. Similarly, there is zero basis to believe that the high level patterns within the brain that we perceive as consciousness are inherently tied to the physical substrate of neurons and their internal complexity.
Furthermore, from an ethical and moral point of view, we would absolutely have to give the AI that claims to be conscious the benefit of the doubt, unless we could prove that it was not conscious.