consciousness

we now have growing reasons to suspect that agency is a genuine natural phenomenon. Biology could stop being so coy about it if only we had a proper theory of how it arises. Unfortunately, no such thing currently exists, but there’s increasing optimism that a theory of agency can be found – and, moreover, that it’s not necessarily unique to living... See more

The first citation given concerns the “uniqueness problem,” which emphasizes a result long known by those of us who worked on IIT: that in systems that have mathematically perfectly symmetric interactions (the specifics are complicated, but just imagine this like a geometric shape), IIT gives conflicting answers as to the boundaries of the... See more

“ Consciousness is what is like to be you. It is the set of experiences, emotions, sensations, and thoughts that occupy your day, at the center of which is always you, the experiencer. You lose consciousness when you go under anesthesia and when in a dreamless sleep, and you gain consciousness when you wake up in the morning or come up from... See more

A popular narrative now casts all living entities as ‘machines’ built by genes, as Richard Dawkins called them. For Mayr, biology was unique among the sciences precisely because its objects of study possessed a program that encoded apparent purpose, design and agency into what they do. On this view, agency doesn’t actually manifest in the moment of... See more

Using the politically-charged “scientific misinformation” term to describe the reasonable articles that the letter cites is—and I’m not going to mince words here—Machiavellian. Unless merely saying anything about IIT should be forbidden, which is what the claim of the letter appears to be.

This is particularly important because there are already indications that many people who often interact with chatbots attribute consciousness to these systems. At the same time, the consensus among experts is that current AI systems are not conscious.