[HervalFreire]

That's an inaccurate test. You can't know if the answer was real or stochastic parroting.

Any attempt at consciousness requires us to define the word. And the word itself may not even represent anything real. We have a feeling for it but those feelings could be illusions and the concept itself is loaded.

For example Love is actually a loaded concept. It's chemically induced but a lot of people attribute it to something deeper and magical. They say love is more then chemical induction.

The problem here is that for love specifically we can prove it's a mechanical concept. Straight people are romantically incapable of loving members of the same sex. So the depth and the magic of it all is strictly segmented based off of biological sex? Doesn't seem deep or meaningful at all. Thus love is an illusion. A loaded and mechanic instinct tricking us with illusions of deeper meaning and emotions into creating progeny for future generations.

Consciousness could be similar. We feel there is something there, but really there isn't.

[adventured]

> Straight people are romantically incapable of loving members of the same sex. So the depth and the magic of it all is strictly segmented based off of biological sex? Doesn't seem deep or meaningful at all. Thus love is an illusion.

You set up your own weak straw argument and then knocked it down with a conclusion that is entirely unsupported.

Since when is love relegated to the romantic sphere? And or since when is that definitely the strongest type of love? The topic is so much wider, so much more elaborate than your set-up pretends.

There's no illusion - love is a complex, durable emotion and is as real as (typically) shorter duration emotions such as anger, fear, joy, etc. Your emotions and thoughts aren't illusions, they're real.

[HervalFreire]

>There's no illusion - love is a complex, durable emotion and is as real as (typically) shorter duration emotions such as anger, fear, joy, etc. Your emotions and thoughts aren't illusions, they're real.

I'm talking about romantic love. Clearly the specifications around romantic love are aligned with evolution and natural selection rather then magic or depth.

A straight human cannot feel romantic love for a horse or a person of the opposite sex. If romantic love was truly a deeper emotion then such an arbitrary sexual delineation wouldn't exist. Think about it. Why should romantic love restrict itself to a certain sex? It's sexist. Biology is sexist when it comes to love. Why?

From this we can no that love is an illusion. It's more of a biological mechanism then it is a spiritual feeling.

[ToValueFunfetti]

I'm inclined to say you're trying to answer a question with the same question.

If you confidently believe that love is an illusion because it's just chemicals moving around, you shouldn't need to wonder about consciousness. If consciousness is not an illusion, it still almost certainly emerges from actions in the physical world. You can plug somebody into an FMRI and see that neurons are lighting up when they see the color blue. I just don't think that's convincing evidence that the experience of blue is an illusion.

[HervalFreire]

If it's not an illusion then you should be able to tell me what it is.

Since you can't. I can easily tell you that it's probably just some classification word with no exact meaning. The concept itself doesn't exist. It's only given existence because of the word.

Take for example the colors black and white. Do those colors truly exist on a gradient? On a gradient we have levels of brightness and darkness at what level of brightness should a color be called white and at what level should we call it black?

I can choose a arbitrary boundary for this threshold, or I can make it more complex and give a third concept: Grey. I can make up more concepts like Light Grey or Dark Grey. These concepts don't actually exist. They are just vocabulary for classification. They are arbitrary zones of demarcation on a gradient classified with a vocabulary word.

My claim is consciousness could be largely the same thing. When does something cross the line from unconscious to conscious? Perhaps this line of demarcation is simply arbitrary. It may be that the concept practically isn't real and any debate about it is just like arguing about where on a gradient does black become white.

Is a logic gate conscious? If I create a network of logic gates when does the amount of logic gates plus how they are interconnected cross the line into sentience? Perhaps the question is meaningless. When does black become white?

[wsgeorge]

> You can't know if the answer was real or stochastic parroting.

I feel like at some point we will have to come to terms with the fact that we could say the same for humans, and we will have to either accept or reject by fiat that a sufficiently capable AI exhibits consciousness.

[slowmovintarget]

Emergent properties of systems aren't less real just because they exist in a different regime than the underlying mechanics of the system.

Tables and chairs are real, though they are the result of interacting quantum fields and a universal quantum wave function. Love and consciousness are real though they may emerge from the mechanics of brains and hormones and the animal sensorium.

[HervalFreire]

> Emergent properties of systems aren't less real just because they exist in a different regime than the underlying mechanics of the system.

I'm not claiming emergent properties aren't real. I am claiming the nature of the word consciousness itself is loaded. We are dealing with a vocabulary problem when it comes to that word... we are not dealing with an actual problem.

For example take your chair and table example. Let's say someone created something that is functionally and looks similar to both a chair and a table. Is it worth your time to argue about the true nature of chairs and tables then? Is it really such a profound concept to encounter a a monstrous hybrid that upends the concept of chair and table? No.

You'd just be arguing semantics. Because chair and table is really a made up concept. You'd be debating about vocabulary. Same with consciousness.