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0 pointsflatline3y ago0 comments

Epistemologically speaking, I think we can roughly break down the potential nature of consciousness into three categories:

- as a function of an independent human soul

- as the fundamental substrate on which the rest of the universe is built

- as a byproduct/secondary phenomenon of physical processes

In the latter two cases I believe that the question of whether GPT is conscious is immaterial. In either case it is functioning in the same medium we all are when we talk, think, write. In the first case it is not, and the question is thornier.

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Jeff_Brown3y ago

Consciousness in this context is often used as an imprecise but important bundle of very material concepts, including whether something can have wants (and therefore warrants our anticipation of them) and whether it deserves ethical status.

One can debate whether either those is necessarily a consequence of consciousness, but nonetheless those kinds of qualities are what people are aiming at when they wonder about conscious AI.

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