I only know I am conscious right now (and I am very confident I was conscious moments ago). So I think a system which is more similar to me at a fundamental physical level should have a higher chance of being conscious. I have no idea about what this implies in terms of concrete probabilities of consciousness. As far as I can tell, the available evidence is compatible with frontier large language models (LLMs) having a probability of consciousness of 10^-6, but also 99.999 %.
As a side note, I would take for granted that all animals and digital systems are sentient, and focus on assessing the distribution of the intensity of subjective experiences. I think asking about the probability of sentience of an animal or digital system shares some of the issues of asking about the probability that an object is hot. People have different concepts about what āhotā means, and they do not depend just on temperature (for example, the minimum temperature for hot wood is higher than the minimum temperature for hot metal because this transfers heat more efficiently). I understand sentience as having subjective experiences whose intensity is not exactly 0. However, I suspect some people understand it as having subjective experiences which are sufficiently intense. Different bars for this will lead to different probabilities. Asking about the distribution of the intensity of subjective experiences mitigates this. For example, one could ask about the probability of the mean intensity of what an LLM experienced writing a message exceeding the mean intensity of human experiences. It still seems super hard to get numbers for this, but what they refer to may be more concrete than a vague concept like sentience.
I do not see how philosophical zombies (p-zombies) could be physically possible. If they were just like humans at a fundamental physical level, they would in fact be humans. So they would be as conscious as humans, which I assume are conscious (because I am a conscious human right now, and other humans do not seem relevantly different).
I endorse the temperature approach. Iām not sure illusionists would accept the question āWhatās the % probability that an entity is conscious?ā as meaningful but maybe a similar question could indeed be universally accepted, like āCompared to your pain intensity 1 (being poked by a needle), whatās your central estimate for the intensity of suffering experienced in scenario X?ā
Just to clarify, my argument didnāt concern classical p-zombies but what I call āhonest p-zombiesāāintelligent humanoid entities capable of metacognition but without any intuition similar to our phenomenal intuitions.
Hi Daniel and titotal. Thanks for the discussion.
I only know I am conscious right now (and I am very confident I was conscious moments ago). So I think a system which is more similar to me at a fundamental physical level should have a higher chance of being conscious. I have no idea about what this implies in terms of concrete probabilities of consciousness. As far as I can tell, the available evidence is compatible with frontier large language models (LLMs) having a probability of consciousness of 10^-6, but also 99.999 %.
As a side note, I would take for granted that all animals and digital systems are sentient, and focus on assessing the distribution of the intensity of subjective experiences. I think asking about the probability of sentience of an animal or digital system shares some of the issues of asking about the probability that an object is hot. People have different concepts about what āhotā means, and they do not depend just on temperature (for example, the minimum temperature for hot wood is higher than the minimum temperature for hot metal because this transfers heat more efficiently). I understand sentience as having subjective experiences whose intensity is not exactly 0. However, I suspect some people understand it as having subjective experiences which are sufficiently intense. Different bars for this will lead to different probabilities. Asking about the distribution of the intensity of subjective experiences mitigates this. For example, one could ask about the probability of the mean intensity of what an LLM experienced writing a message exceeding the mean intensity of human experiences. It still seems super hard to get numbers for this, but what they refer to may be more concrete than a vague concept like sentience.
I do not see how philosophical zombies (p-zombies) could be physically possible. If they were just like humans at a fundamental physical level, they would in fact be humans. So they would be as conscious as humans, which I assume are conscious (because I am a conscious human right now, and other humans do not seem relevantly different).
I endorse the temperature approach. Iām not sure illusionists would accept the question āWhatās the % probability that an entity is conscious?ā as meaningful but maybe a similar question could indeed be universally accepted, like āCompared to your pain intensity 1 (being poked by a needle), whatās your central estimate for the intensity of suffering experienced in scenario X?ā
Just to clarify, my argument didnāt concern classical p-zombies but what I call āhonest p-zombiesāāintelligent humanoid entities capable of metacognition but without any intuition similar to our phenomenal intuitions.