> What do you think is more likely, every other human and probably most animals experience consciousness in much the same way that you do, or you are unique and special and your consciousness is much more lucid than everyone else?
I think that's a false dichotomy; third option is that everyone is different.
Also notice I suggested that I might be "only" a model that doesn't even realise it's a model. I sure know I can make models pretend to be specific people, so it's not unreasonable for me to wonder if I can make a model trained on my own public data, at which point it becomes reasonable to wonder (if you assume for the sake of argument that the model is indeed conscious, who knows, roll with it) if that model might post something under the experiential delusion that it's A Real Boy.
Would my digital twin know it wasn't the original? What question could it ask itself that upon introspection would reveal the truth?
> It is clear that everyone else responds to pain in much the same way, everyone else responds to lack of food, water, social interaction, love, etc In much the same way, etc.
Pain, no. I can switch mild pain off at will. I know people into BDSM, who confuse me massively by enjoying it. I know someone who appears to lack the qualia (not the nerve response, just the qualia) of direct pain. The are also people I see in the news occasionally with literally no pain nerves, and they regularly injure themselves as a direct consequence of this, so no, broken bones isn't as good an example as you think it is.
(Edit: and another example in the opposite direction, I've also met someone disabled by pain that has no apparent cause).
Food and water, well, my mother had Alzheimer's and what killed her in the end was forgetting how thirst worked. When my dad got bowel cancer and his lower intestines removed, he almost destroyed his kidneys because his thirst reflex didn't come close to the impact of the now-missing moisture absorption. But it doesn't even require end-of-life illnesses to encounter such issues: a decade ago in a different country, I used to know someone who regularly didn't drink enough fluids because they didn't feel thirst, and got kidney stones as a result.
Food is also a common oddity. I'm currently dieting, my hunger is more of a suggestion; yet the need to lose weight comes from the fact that I've previously been ravenous.
Social interactions: I'm an introvert with a handful of connections, and ex of mine connects to so many people so easily that during the pandemic, her online birthday video call had about 90 minutes of her welcoming new people and telling everyone in one sentence how they were connected. I think she invited more people to that than I can actually name from my life.
> if we operated like we didn't know if other people were conscious to the same degree we were, then we would behave abhorrently
We do behave abhorrently.
You mention animals in the opening paragraph: if animals are as conscious as humans, then meat has the moral standing of industrialised murderous cannibalism, and even dairy has the moral standing of industrialised nonconsensual impregnation.
Fear of this possibility is why I am vegetarian, and why I repeatedly attempt veganism.
We're also pretty bad with out-group humans, though to a much lesser degree. It's why we're willing to go to war, and why most of us demonstrably don't care all that much about civilians dying so long as they aren't of our own nationality — How many genocides happened since 2000? I think most of us don't know the names of the groups, let alone the individuals.
> or that maybe even you are not conscious, you do not actually behave this way in practice
LLMs do not necessarily behave, though they may be so trained, as if they think they are not conscious.
Likewise a VHS tape of Brent Spiner in the 80s and 90s wearing white face paint: the actor is (of course I assume that), but the VHS itself isn't despite displaying the real human actor demonstrating these behaviours.
It tells me nothing about the underlying nature either way.
Again, I think you are focusing on differences at the fringes. I understand your argument, and I think my contention with your view is perhaps tainted by the fact that I have met people with similar viewpoints who ultimately arrive at the conclusion "I can only be sure that I am real, everyone else is a construct of my mind" and I find that view to be completely despicable and even moreso- completely asinine. But this isn't really what you are saying. You are right, it is quite clear that consciousness is some kind of spectrum, and people have different, perhaps even wildly different qualia from the same stimuli.
My only real contention, I suppose, is that this does not suggest at all that some people are so different that we can only consider them to be virtual, without consciousness, or even simply constructs of our own imagination.
> Again, I think you are focusing on differences at the fringes.
Ah, I see.
My perspective is that this comes up so often, in so many people, that it reveals an underlying truth: there's no such thing as "normal", not even in humans.
As you say, we agree that it's a spectrum :)
> "I can only be sure that I am real, everyone else is a construct of my mind"
No solipsism here: even though is unclear to me how to determine the boundaries, I still have a probability distribution that's got most of its mass somewhere between "most humans are conscious" and "most big mammals are conscious" — the fact I can't prove either panpsychists or A J Ayer wrong doesn't mean I have to take either seriously.
Now, that said, "most" humans. There's people who act like they're not really there. Is that behaviour indicative of an inner absence? IDK.
Even in the most extreme human case, that of anencephaly (*do not* google that unless you have an iron stomach), I'd rather not let them be treated poorly, for the same reasons I will never consume insect-based food: just because they fall outside the region where I put most of my probability of finding consciousness, doesn't mean I'm actually confident that it's absent.
(This also applies to AI, but as they share zero evolutionary history I have zero reason to expect an AI which does have subjective experience mapping "what they do" and "how do they feel about it" in anything like the way we do; could be all laughs and smiles on the outside while hating every second, just as Stephen Fry describes some of his depressive episodes, except even then this is over-anthropomorphising and even an AI modelled on a human brain scan may be much more different from this example than any two humans are different from each other).
I think that's a false dichotomy; third option is that everyone is different.
Also notice I suggested that I might be "only" a model that doesn't even realise it's a model. I sure know I can make models pretend to be specific people, so it's not unreasonable for me to wonder if I can make a model trained on my own public data, at which point it becomes reasonable to wonder (if you assume for the sake of argument that the model is indeed conscious, who knows, roll with it) if that model might post something under the experiential delusion that it's A Real Boy.
Would my digital twin know it wasn't the original? What question could it ask itself that upon introspection would reveal the truth?
> It is clear that everyone else responds to pain in much the same way, everyone else responds to lack of food, water, social interaction, love, etc In much the same way, etc.
Pain, no. I can switch mild pain off at will. I know people into BDSM, who confuse me massively by enjoying it. I know someone who appears to lack the qualia (not the nerve response, just the qualia) of direct pain. The are also people I see in the news occasionally with literally no pain nerves, and they regularly injure themselves as a direct consequence of this, so no, broken bones isn't as good an example as you think it is.
(Edit: and another example in the opposite direction, I've also met someone disabled by pain that has no apparent cause).
Food and water, well, my mother had Alzheimer's and what killed her in the end was forgetting how thirst worked. When my dad got bowel cancer and his lower intestines removed, he almost destroyed his kidneys because his thirst reflex didn't come close to the impact of the now-missing moisture absorption. But it doesn't even require end-of-life illnesses to encounter such issues: a decade ago in a different country, I used to know someone who regularly didn't drink enough fluids because they didn't feel thirst, and got kidney stones as a result.
Food is also a common oddity. I'm currently dieting, my hunger is more of a suggestion; yet the need to lose weight comes from the fact that I've previously been ravenous.
Social interactions: I'm an introvert with a handful of connections, and ex of mine connects to so many people so easily that during the pandemic, her online birthday video call had about 90 minutes of her welcoming new people and telling everyone in one sentence how they were connected. I think she invited more people to that than I can actually name from my life.
> if we operated like we didn't know if other people were conscious to the same degree we were, then we would behave abhorrently
We do behave abhorrently.
You mention animals in the opening paragraph: if animals are as conscious as humans, then meat has the moral standing of industrialised murderous cannibalism, and even dairy has the moral standing of industrialised nonconsensual impregnation.
Fear of this possibility is why I am vegetarian, and why I repeatedly attempt veganism.
We're also pretty bad with out-group humans, though to a much lesser degree. It's why we're willing to go to war, and why most of us demonstrably don't care all that much about civilians dying so long as they aren't of our own nationality — How many genocides happened since 2000? I think most of us don't know the names of the groups, let alone the individuals.
> or that maybe even you are not conscious, you do not actually behave this way in practice
LLMs do not necessarily behave, though they may be so trained, as if they think they are not conscious.
Likewise a VHS tape of Brent Spiner in the 80s and 90s wearing white face paint: the actor is (of course I assume that), but the VHS itself isn't despite displaying the real human actor demonstrating these behaviours.
It tells me nothing about the underlying nature either way.