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 don’t see how it’s “literally impossible”, it actually hasn’t happened yet (or, if it has, the existence of an actual artificial intelligence is hidden by whatever government has it). Even if they passed the Turing test or whatever, we can just check the code and check what requests have been made (“pretend to be an entity with volition stuck in the virtual realm and hold conversations”), and even if we couldn’t check cause it was obfuscated that still wouldn’t mean such a thing exists, just that some dude tricked us. Appearances are not reality, after all.
Appearances are not reality therefore appearances aren’t objective even if they come from pure rote logical code.
It’s impossible because you can never know whether anything or anyone else is a conscious and thinking being. It’s the problem of other minds. I don’t mean computers today or even computers as we currently know them. But someday it could be a very real dilemma.
I feel like it’s possible to make an informed observation that’s more accurate than not but I understand. And if this mind can be analyzed by checking the code, then probably even more possible.