> After all, does it seem like any one of these features, or all of them combined, comprise what William James described as the “warmth” of conscious experience? Or, in Thomas Nagel’s words, “what it is like” to be you? There is a gap between the ways we can measure subjective experience with science and subjective experience itself. This is what David Chalmers has labeled the “hard problem” of consciousness. Even if an A.I. system has recurrent processing, a global workspace, and a sense of its physical location — what if it still lacks the thing that makes it feel like something?
> When I brought up this emptiness to Robert Long, a philosopher at the Center for A.I. Safety who led work on the report, he said, “That feeling is kind of a thing that happens whenever you try to scientifically explain, or reduce to physical processes, some high-level concept.”
Writers once talked of an 'elixir of life' - some indescribable quality of biological life that could not be replicated in the laboratory. It gave life a hidden, magical quality. We now know that the concept of an 'elixir of life' is false - we can replicate at a chemical level, all the building blocks of life.
We'll probably feel this way about consciousness in the coming years, but articles like this from the NYT indicate that the general public is not there yet.
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[ 3.3 ms ] story [ 155 ms ] threadIs your "AI" created with current or previous technology? Then the answer is 'No, it's not conscious'.
Now you don't need to read TFA. And you're welcome.
> When I brought up this emptiness to Robert Long, a philosopher at the Center for A.I. Safety who led work on the report, he said, “That feeling is kind of a thing that happens whenever you try to scientifically explain, or reduce to physical processes, some high-level concept.”
Writers once talked of an 'elixir of life' - some indescribable quality of biological life that could not be replicated in the laboratory. It gave life a hidden, magical quality. We now know that the concept of an 'elixir of life' is false - we can replicate at a chemical level, all the building blocks of life.
We'll probably feel this way about consciousness in the coming years, but articles like this from the NYT indicate that the general public is not there yet.