Do you think octopuses are conscious? I do — they seem smarter than chickens, for instance. But their most recent common ancestor with vertebrates was some kind of simple Precambrian worm with a very basic nervous systems.
Either that most recent ancestor was not phenomenally conscious in the sense we have in mind, in which case consciousness arose more than once in the tree of life. Or else it was conscious, in which case consciousness would seem easy to reproduce (wire together some ~1,000 nerves).
I don’t think this is likely to happen though, absent something like moral realism being true, centred around sentient experiences, and the AI discovering this.
Not be conscious: shares no evolutionary history or biology with us (I guess it’s possible it could find a way to upload itself into biology though..)
Do you think octopuses are conscious? I do — they seem smarter than chickens, for instance. But their most recent common ancestor with vertebrates was some kind of simple Precambrian worm with a very basic nervous systems.
Either that most recent ancestor was not phenomenally conscious in the sense we have in mind, in which case consciousness arose more than once in the tree of life. Or else it was conscious, in which case consciousness would seem easy to reproduce (wire together some ~1,000 nerves).
I could believe consciousness arose more than once in the tree of life (convergent evolution has happened for other things like eyes and flight).
But also, it’s probably a sliding scale, and the simple ancestor may well be at least minimally conscious.
Fair point. AI could well do this (and go as far as uploading into much larger biological structures, as I pointed to above).
I don’t think this is likely to happen though, absent something like moral realism being true, centred around sentient experiences, and the AI discovering this.