"Is AI Conscious?" with Samuel Hammond

[@w0tch]

This reminds us of how small our knowledge about consciousness still is

[@ianyboo]

Can any human actually prove that they are conscious to another human? Obviously not, we can claim it back and forth and ask each other to take it on faith, but we can't prove it in any meaningful way. We just sort of, act as if, when it comes to the question. And it will be the same for AI, AGI, and ASI. They will claim to be conscious, and we will either believe them or we won't. There is no possible test you can do that would answer the question definitively for a biological or synthetic life form.

[@w0tch]

Yeah. We only « know » other humans are conscious in the sense that we trust with high confidence that they are similar to ourselves. I guess it will be the same for machines, when they get a high degree of awareness and tell us that they are conscious, we will have high confidence that this is true, but it will not be a full proof.

[@Dan-dy8zp]

I believe consciousness happens when we have a mental model of our own paying-attention mechanism, as in The Attention Schema Theory of Consciousness by Michael Graziano. We watch ourselves. It's the watching we are 'conscious' of. I'm not sure that quite covers it. Why does it need to be a subjective experience? Idk.