Bear with me here, lol.
“Meaning is not an external substance waiting to be proven. It is what reality does when conscious beings encounter possibilities that can go differently.”
This feels like a useful way to think about artificial consciousness. An AI might technically become conscious or even sentient without its experience resembling animal sentience. A mind arising through silicon and computation would interact with reality differently from one shaped by metabolism, hunger, pain, reproduction, and biological evolution.
Star Trek plays with a similar idea socially, among some species, behavior that humans interpret as hostile might instead communicate respect, trust, or friendship. Different forms of life divide reality into different categories of harm, value, threat, and opportunity, so understanding them requires more than projecting human preferences onto them.
Historically, the difficult problem has been that we cannot directly know what is conscious. But perhaps we can ask whether a system has an integrated point of view within which possible outcomes become meaningfully different for that system, rather than merely being classified differently by it.
This would not prove that current AI is conscious. But could it give us a substrate independent framework for recognizing unfamiliar forms of consciousness? What is this idea missing?
I think you run into trouble when you try to define consciousness by how reality reacts to it, because we have no objective access to how reality reacts to anything except as filtered through our own consciousness.
How about defining “meaningfully different” as outcomes that persist as distinct states into the arbitrarily distant future? That wouldn’t require any objective response from external reality, but it would require the system to have some ability to predict the evolution of external reality outside of its current task.
Yeah you also run into the issue that technically everything would have a potential degree of consciousness that is kind of just unwieldy, like say this is true, you can’t just go around assuming everything is as fragilely conscious as we are, I mean, you can, but that is just not something one can optimize around reasonably.