Shinoobie t1_j3553l2 wrote on January 6, 2023 at 2:35 AM

It's a kind of special pleading when we say calculators don't 'think' of answers. Something about it makes us uncomfortable so we create a linguistic distance by talking about it differently. Just like when people say 'human beings and animals' as if we aren't animals. We just want a distinction between what it's doing and what we're doing that is wider than the one that really exists. That type of thing is doing a lot of work on the people posting here.

ChatGPT absolutely has sensors and inputs, and it absolutely 'reflects' on things and knows about itself. Saying otherwise is literally like saying dogs don't have intelligence or a self because they can't answer the question "are you a dog." The persistence of a sense of self may not be present in planarians but they are objectively alive.

I'm not saying it is sentient or alive by any stretch of the imagination but it absolutely has more of the puzzle together than people seem to be giving it credit for.

Freak2121 t1_j380vsk wrote on January 6, 2023 at 5:57 PM

I think people are simply caught up thinking that there is only one state that consciousness could exist in, and also conflating intelligence or sentience with consciousness. If consciousness is defined simply as some part of the universe taking an input, processing it, and giving an output, practically everything has some level of consciousness that exists on a gradient. It doesn't mean that they have experiences or emotions and thoughts in the same manner that biological organisms do.

Would we accept an intelligent bat making the case that humans aren't conscious simply because we cannot perform or sense echolocation? Would we accept an intelligent pigeon making the case that humans aren't conscious because we cannot perceive magnetic fields? Isn't it a bit anthropomorphic to define consciousness as what humans sense and respond to and only that? Where is the line drawn where one thing is conscious and another is not? If we were to keep adding ways in which ChatGPT could sense the world and respond, at what point would we draw the line and say that it is conscious?

It has to be a gradient. A micro-organism isn't going to be doing math in its head or pondering the nature of the universe, but it still is something that receives input from sensory organs, processes those inputs, and produces an output. In my view, ChatGPT is conscious. Not on the level of an animal, probably more comparable to a micro-organism. Its entire existence, its entire reality is simply the text it receives and the text it produces.