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I'm trying to understand your position... It's my belief that I can tell that a table isn't conscious. Conscious things have the ability to feel like the thing

• armchairhacker 11mo ago
  You can imagine a table feeling if you can imagine the table not doing anything (being unable to or deciding not to). It's not intuitive because it doesn't really help you, whereas imagining a human or even animal as conscious lets you predict its next actions (by predicting your next actions if you were in its place), so there's an evolutionary benefit (also because it causes empathy which causes altruism). > Why suspect that something that isn't organic life can be conscious, if we have no reason to suspect it? There may be no good reason unless you feel it's interesting. Although there's probably at least one good reason to imagine consciousness specifically on a (non-organic) neural network: because, like humans and animals, it lets us predict how the NN will behave (in some situations; in others it's detrimental, because even though they're more similar than any known non-NN algorithm, NNs are still much different than humans and moreso than animals like dogs).
  • kylecazar 11mo ago
    Thanks for elaborating, I get what you mean by orthogonal to reality now... I think what you are on to is the utility for us to see some x as conscious. I went down a panpsychism rabbit hole relatively recently and haven't fully recovered.