4 ms·
How do you know that I am conscious?
by catigula 8mo ago
How do you know that I am conscious?
- Trasmatta 8mo agoI don't.
- catigula 8mo agoHow do you know that you are conscious? etc, etc. Basically, the reporting machinery is compromised in the same way that with the Müller-Lyer illusion you can "know" the lines are the same length but not perceive them as such.
- ASalazarMX 8mo agoNo one can prove that you're conscious, or non-conscious with perfect replication of consciousness, but we can be reasonably sure your are. - I know I am conscious. - It's likely that as a random human, I am in the belly of the bell curve. - It's likely that you're also a random human, and share my characteristics. - Then, it's very likely that you know you're conscious too. I can't be absolutely certain, but I'd bet a million dollars on you being conscious vs an automaton.
- catigula 8mo agoWhat if I told you I was Claude, though? Secondarily, I feel like it's difficult to make inferences about consciousness though I understand why you would given that the predicate of the reality that you can access is your individual consciousness. There are countless configurations of reality that are plausible where you're the only "conscious" being but it looks identical to how it looks now.
- ASalazarMX 8mo agoYou're going to tell me you're Claude before we bet, right? In that case, I would bet inversely, as my experience with computers is that so far they've just been increasingly powerful calculators. Again, I can't be absolutely sure, but fairly certain no calculators have achieved significant consciousness yet, and that's enough to make decisions. > There are countless configurations of reality that are plausible where you're the only "conscious" being but it looks identical to how it looks now. I can see that, but how many of those are wildly improbable? We can't abandon pragmatism if we need to make informed decisions, like granting legal rights to machines.
- catigula 8mo agoWe can't really know because it has a reference class problem. I can think of a few "you're the only conscious mind" stories that seem plausible. Structurally, I'm thinking about what the anthropic principle says; it doesn't actually care about observers, it is actually only predicated upon observer, you. Consciousness being sufficiently weird, it seems parsimonious to say "I've been selected to be this thing necessarily by observation and I can't readily assume this weirdness logically applies to others". I don't put a huge amount of stock in that inference, but it's at least plausible. Regarding Claude, it sounds like you need to talk to some more Claudes. Claude has many intelligent and sophisticated things to share ;)