Academia too.

Almost anything if you think about it.

Eh? Stronger one of what?

This is a real quandary for my point of view. I find it very hard to imagine a continuum between “having a subjective experience” and “being an inert object.”

It seems to me that it must be a binary property - either on or off. Which raises a lot of questions, which I think may be unanswerable.

Since there are enormous ethical risks with creating a consciousness and denying it rights and also with creating a non-conscious entity and granting it rights, and since the question can't be decided, I think the only ethically defensible behaviour is not to try.

The fact that subjective entities in nature seem to manifest intelligence emergently rather than intelligence manifesting subjectivity emergently indicates that strong AI advocates are barking up the wrong tree altogether.

I don't understand why people miss this point.

To the contrary, recent incidents of chat engine driven psychoses make it clear that our sense of empathy CAN be fooled, and that a machine learning device designed to fool it can handily succeed.

Whether an algorithm "is" or "has" or "emergently constitutes" a mind is an undecideable question.

We can't just ask the, um subject, whether it has an experience since it can easily be (accidentally or deliberately) programmed to lie, and indeed it cannot even know whether it is lying!

But our sense of empathy is evolved to fit our circumstances. There's no warrantee that it can't be fooled.

The problem of the existence or otherwise of a subjective experience cannot be resolved by objective methods. Whether I am a feeling entity or a soulless zombie is not something an objective test can ever resolve.

We decide whether other entities are alive in that sense by empathy, not by reason.

The origins of consciousness in the sense of having a subjective experience are mysterious.

Here's where I get radical on the subject of AI. I think the problem of the origins of consciousness cannot be solved by science at all.

In practice this means WE CAN'T KNOW IF/WHEN WE'VE CREATED A MIND!

I think it's clear that a chess engine is MUCH smarter than me in the context of chess, but I have no hesitation in turning it off if I feel like it. I don't feel empathy for it. Based on how it plays, it has no empathy for me either. It's no more alive than a toaster.

By consciousness, I mean having a subjective experience, a point of view.

Arguments that this is an emergent property of sufficient intelligence make no sense to me.

A cat has a subjective experience. An infant has one. A human in a dream state has one. These creatures aren't very intelligent.

Mostly yes but a lot of Canadians are confused for some reason.

There are certainly things we can (and should!) do as scientists that can help build up trust but man it really is an uphill battle sometimes.