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Saturday, December 17th, 2016 10:08 pm (UTC)
This reminds me of something an AI prof in grad school once said. It was fashionable for decades to ask, "Can machines be intelligent?" His take on that, which I agree with, was, "Who cares as long as they do what you want them to do and not what you don't?" There's an analogy here with the question, "What, if anything, is consciousness?" I say that the answer doesn't matter if it doesn't impact human survival, happiness, or whatever other goal you want to optimize life for.

And even if you do still care, I think the answer may be disappointing. [livejournal.com profile] randomdreams mentioned animals. There's a whole range of complexity from great apes to the organisms [livejournal.com profile] tylik studies; there may even be a few organisms whose behavior people can realistically simulate by now. The question of whether a given organism is conscious or not is going to look like the one for whether it's living or not; basic, mechanistic answers have won out for the latter.

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