"A sense of awareness." Does that work as a definition of consciousness? Also "sensible inwardly," and where we might get into trouble: "knowing." Do you think

"A sense of awareness." Does that work as a definition of consciousness? Also "sensible inwardly," and where we might get into trouble: "knowing." Do you think AI has a sense of awareness? I can't see one reason to ascribe a sense of awareness to any current form of AI, as world-changing and amazing as it is already. Even the I in AI tugs at me because I feel it might be a metaphor taken literally. As in, McDonalds is a hamburger empire but surely not a real empire. AI "knows" something in a way similar to how the dictionary "knows" the definition of a word. Beware of taking metaphors literally; there be dragons (but not real dragons)! AI has advanced beyond symbolic processing, it processes information in fantastic new ways, but it strictly speaking understands nothing. We take the processed information and we understand it (or don't). But maybe there's a case to be made that I'm being unfair, and it's actually justifiable to say that AI "thinks" without being conscious, aware, or sentient. On panpsychists, if their heady intuition is somehow not deluded and a form of awareness or consciousness is a fundamental quality of matter or in some other way ubiquitous, maybe like "The Force" in Star Wars, that's clearly not the way that people would mean conscious here. An appropriate way to discuss AI in that context would be, "AI is slightly conscious just like everything else." And if consciousness were somehow a quality of all matter it still wouldn't mean that, say, a chair is conscious as a chair or a tokamak as a tokamak, or even a carrot as a carrot, but rather that the matter that makes up those things and everything else has some kind of awareness.