We don't have any scientific reason to believe that human consciousness isn't purely the result of the workings of the human brain, which is just made up of ato

We don't have any scientific reason to believe that human consciousness isn't purely the result of the workings of the human brain, which is just made up of atoms. Yet I experience consciousness, I'm somehow 'here', and have the capacity to suffer. And I assume all other humans are too, as if I am, there's no reason everyone else should be too. But to some external intelligence, why should they believe me when I say that. I'm just a collection of atoms arranged in a way that produces intelligence and self-awareness, but why would they have reason to believe I'm conscious, as opposed to just saying that as a side-effect of how my intelligence works? If we were to figure out how to scan a brain and simulate it on a computer, would we expect that simulation to be conscious? I personally suspect it's somehow an emergent property of this sort of self-aware intelligence that we are, and see no reason a similar artificial intelligence with free-will wouldn't also be conscious and have the ability to suffer. We consider many animals able to suffer, so we have to ask the question as to whether a much more sophisticated algorithm (but not something of human-level intelligence and with free-will) could be able to suffer in the same way. Note they say: > Most reinforcement learners in operation today likely do not have significant moral weight, but this could very well change as AI research develops. > We do not know what kinds of algorithm actually "experience" suffering or pleasure. In order to concretely answer this question we would need to fully understand consciousness, a notoriously difficult task. While I don't believe what we have today can suffer, we don't understand consciousness, and I think it's a valid question to ask. Like AI safety, it's something we should be getting out ahead on, compared to where the state of AI is today.