I’m pretty confident artificial consciousness is possible, though I haven’t looked into it much. This is primarily because it seems like consciousness will be a property of the cognition, and independent of the substrate running that cognition.
As an intuition pump, suppose we understand in great detail the exact equations governing the firing of synapses in the brain, and we then recreate my brain in software using these equations. I claim that, given an environment that mimics the real world (i.e. inputs to the optic nerve that are identical to what the retina would have received, similarly for the other senses, and outputs to all of the muscles, including the tongue (for speech)), that the resulting system would do exactly what I would do (including e.g. saying that I am conscious when asked). It seems very likely that this system too is conscious.
(I’m also confident that digital beings can have the capacity for positive and negative experiences.)
If you ask me about particular digital “beings” (e.g. AI systems, databases, Google search), then I become a lot more uncertain about (1) and (2).
I’m pretty confident artificial consciousness is possible, though I haven’t looked into it much. This is primarily because it seems like consciousness will be a property of the cognition, and independent of the substrate running that cognition.
As an intuition pump, suppose we understand in great detail the exact equations governing the firing of synapses in the brain, and we then recreate my brain in software using these equations. I claim that, given an environment that mimics the real world (i.e. inputs to the optic nerve that are identical to what the retina would have received, similarly for the other senses, and outputs to all of the muscles, including the tongue (for speech)), that the resulting system would do exactly what I would do (including e.g. saying that I am conscious when asked). It seems very likely that this system too is conscious.
(I’m also confident that digital beings can have the capacity for positive and negative experiences.)
If you ask me about particular digital “beings” (e.g. AI systems, databases, Google search), then I become a lot more uncertain about (1) and (2).