Seems common sense that time perception is required for consciousness. Something which has no perception of time has to be very wildly different to whatever we mean by consciousness.

Also we don't even know if consciousness can be of different flavors. It could be a sort of spectrum of consciousness, more or less, with more or less assistance from some parts of the brain.

>If we ever found other species that were consciousness they wouldn't automatically be "human" nor would they have the same legal rights.

This is the tricky part, you can never know. Scientifically speaking, and logically, you can never ever tell something is conscious. We all assume we all are, because we're very similar to eachother, thus you must have what I have, my subjective experience of reality. That's it. That's what we all base our human consciousness on. Agreeing we must have it, since we are very similar in shape/structure/behavior. That's all there is to it.

We are not scientific consciousness detectors, we just got used to assuming we all are. That is why we never really extended it to animals, because we cannot scientifically know, only agree on it, and that's not very lucrative for the people who can decide if humans officially agree animals are conscious or not, because of farming, because we need to displace or even wipe whole species to use the resources from their lands.

There's also religious reasons to deny animals consciousness, which again is practical aspect shoved into religion, to help with less debates around this subject, makes things easier.

So in the end it will always be a collective decision. Or a political one at least. If and when we decide something other than us is or isn't conscious.

Also remember, just because it acts conscious doesn't mean it really is. A piece of software that is not even based on LLMs can act conscious. So could a biological alien, it could act conscious but we can never know, we can only decide.

It does have what we have if it works on the same principles of our brains. It kind of does to some degree atm, but that will clearly get more and more to a more degree. Figuring out where is the consciousness line, how much of what we have does it need, as functional parts of our brains etc, that's so complex that we might have to call it before just to make sure.

Even so, indeed having control over the structure of their brains puts them in a vastly category compared to humans. Once we stop functioning our brains quickly degrade and information is lost.

Thus in this sense kill means deleting all information about it. It is a very complicated subject to discuss, hardly does any justice in online replies.

>you can't hold the person responsible

The act of holding them responsible is supposed to determine them not do it. If stochastic behavior is impeding them in being a functional member of society then it still makes sense to remove them from society, why would you choose to live amongst people who are not behaving rationally? Or allow them to hurt other people? At the end of the day the why matters less to removing them or not from society. And sentences are clearly used as a determining factor.

The holding responsible part deals with politics and more primitive aspects of our societies and biologies. Getting tangled up in holding them responsible or not is hardly something you should give much attention to. Rather to make sure they do not cause any more harm and also make sure such things are not created in the first place. Which opens up another can of worms for which society and politicians are ready for.

>and given that QM effects don't scale to molecular level, that leaves only determinism

This is simply wrong. Quantum effects affect your choices more than it might seem possible. The wrong atom decays in the wrong place in your body mutating your DNA, that one too much string of DNA that starts a tumor, which means chemotherapy. That does seem to affect your choices.

Or instead of Shroedinger's cat you use it to trigger something, buy or sell some stock. Which clearly affects your future, one way or another.

I never really understood why humans keep insisting stochastic processes do not affect their choices and their future. It's very short sighted.

Hell, even brownian noise in your brain can affect your ideas, that one random spark out of nowhere, that one neuron that's pushed over the triggering edge. There's so much stuff all around us affecting us constantly. One neutrino interacting a the wrong time (average one does interact with our bodies across whole life, I remember reading), one cosmic ray.

This isn't enough to be relevant to free will. You can construct massive impact by tying them to quantum systems, and one off things that happen occasionally given the length of a lifetime. But the quantum effects that are needed for free will need to be continuous. We can build a system where QM decides if a nerve cell fires or not, but that is very different from QM being involving in determine if every (or most, or even 1%) of nerve cells firing.

(And even if QM did factor in normally, that just reduces it from determinism to random chance, "free will" still doesn't show up. That's like arguing an AI with sufficiently well implemented RNG is necessary to be conscious.)

Even so you still cannot ever test for it.

The very best you can do is define human consciousness as requiring the functions of a human brain, and try to figure out (decide/agree) the chances that something which is working loosely on the same principles is or isn't conscious.

At the end of the day it will always be an agreement, never scientifically proven as fact.

Esperanto failed because it is a mix a multiple languages. It's a fully political language, hence why it went nowhere.

>It is an illusion to think of AI as we know them today as being without bias and without ideology.

That doesn't mean we cannot strive for no bias.

>Furthermore, the English language's place as the de-facto international language of the western world is a matter of both historical relevance (the influence of the late British Empire) and convenience.

That is still not a good argument. It explains the current state of things. It doesn't say it's the best we can do, collectively.

>Esperanto is easy to learn and easy to speak, and yet it is neither historically relevant nor convenient to learn and use, and as such is relegated, like most other conlangs, to relative obscurity and niche uses.

It's meh. It's the jack of all trades really. It's not congruent. It's a literal mix.

> I would recommend starting with Saussure's lectures, and then studying some of Noam Chomsky's early work, and from there the world is your oyster.

I will start studying them, thank you for your recommendations.

> It's meh. It's the jack of all trades really. It's not congruent. It's a literal mix.

That's the fun part, all languages are a mix of other languages that came before them. English borrows heavily from French, which borrows heavily from Latin, which was partially inspired by Greek which... This isn't a problem, necessarily. It's just how language works and evolves, and while it can lead to some ambiguity and confusion, it can also be a doorway to learning (if you already know french, the many english words that are based on french will be easier for you to grasp, giving you a foothold to work off of)

I find it interesting that you speak of "the best we can do" or that a constructed language could be "better" than natural languages.

By what metrics would you measure a language as being better than any other? In other words, when you envision the "best language", what does it look like? What would it accomplish that natural languages can't?

(in case my tone isn't clear, I'm asking out of genuine curiosity, not trying to be combative or anything like that, look forward to hearing back from you)

We absolutely can invent a new language. It won't be as good as AI could make it.

For example, it could analyze a lot of data and catalog how certain sounds are perceived, analyze what we struggle with communicating today at international level, make certain needed distinctions, be more precise while simple/casual. Including alphabet and computer use/communication/programming. There's a lot of extra details AI can account for. Some that we don't even know or understand yet.

I personally think a modern and new global language could help the state of things. Like an actual well thought out subject, with no political abuse at all. Purely science driven.

>Everyone wants to rule the world and couldn't care less about anything else.

This might be scarily true. But we end up in the same problem, which is the fear of most people being wiped up.

Does it matter if the AI is doing it on its own or at the wishes of a small group of powerful people? For all intents and purposes they are both the same thing in the end, for most people anyway.

I think in all of these debates people lose track of one of the major vectors of threat, as you said, other humans. From my point of view this is an ever bigger problem with this tech, like orders of magnitude bigger.

The current setup we find ourselves in is based on a very important detail that is easily lost because it is so old we don't really think about it. There is, or rather was, an incentive for more people to exist, because they are valuable for work and defense.

Some people wrongly use the industrial revolution to argue against AI completely replacing human work, but that is very wrong. What is happening with AI has nothing to do with the industrial revolution, as equivalence. Back then you'd just free up humans for higher level work. Now, theoretically, anything you could ever think a human could do, AI would theoretically do better. So no matter what job you come up with, using AI instead of a human gives a better outcome, cheaper, more reliable, faster.

Coming back to initial subject, one thing that kept everyone in check was our inability of actually wiping everyone out. Sure, we had nukes but they ruin the Earth so nobody can inhabit it if they all go off. But with AI, centralizing so much power up top, and taking it away from regular people...that is the biggest danger in this scenario, by far. Not some rogue AI, rather rogue human groups that have the power and technology to do away with basically everyone else, or a good bit of everyone else.

This threat is way bigger and never addressed. Like...suspiciously never addressed.