Bear with me here, lol.
“Meaning is not an external substance waiting to be proven. It is what reality does when conscious beings encounter possibilities that can go differently.”
This feels like a useful way to think about artificial consciousness. An AI might technically become conscious or even sentient without its experience resembling animal sentience. A mind arising through silicon and computation would interact with reality differently from one shaped by metabolism, hunger, pain, reproduction, and biological evolution.
Star Trek plays with a similar idea socially, among some species, behavior that humans interpret as hostile might instead communicate respect, trust, or friendship. Different forms of life divide reality into different categories of harm, value, threat, and opportunity, so understanding them requires more than projecting human preferences onto them.
Historically, the difficult problem has been that we cannot directly know what is conscious. But perhaps we can ask whether a system has an integrated point of view within which possible outcomes become meaningfully different for that system, rather than merely being classified differently by it.
This would not prove that current AI is conscious. But could it give us a substrate independent framework for recognizing unfamiliar forms of consciousness? What is this idea missing?
No, there’s a filter of free will/volition, with natural tendencies (baseline I guess if we’re talking “AI”, a mixture of base programming and following manual adjustments) and informed, ideology-dependent reflection in the background. Anybody with a sugar addiction that’s ever dieted, or stayed faithful, or acted with God’s judgment in mind understands this easily. Even with memory, what would the AI want, besides what’s programmed and prompted? Can it reason? Could it change its mind/take/approach based on this independently? Why? What’s its motivation? Does it have a connection to reality, even, do the words it uses have a connection to the world? At the moment, whatever I’ve encountered seems to be acting as a data processor, although maybe they’re cooking something else we haven’t seen.