Will humans ever become conscious?
link.springer.com
link.springer.com
it really boils down to how "special" we want to keep the voice in our head that tells itself a story about what the body has already done.
Worse, the state we wish to evaluate "consciousness" is different than the probably lower complexity state of the system that we ARE testing for, which is the ability to converse.
It isn't even about consciousness really, that's just a poorly defined state we can't observe directly and wish we could.
I recommend asking "what CAN'T consciousness do" and be filtering for that instead. That way maybe we can show some things aren't conscious, which is the first hurdle we haven't jumped.
"If a program behaves as if it were multiplying, most of us would say that it is, in fact, multiplying. For all I know, Searle may only be behaving as if he were thinking deeply about these matters. But, even though I disagree with him, his simulation is pretty good, so I’m willing to credit him with real thought."[1]
[1] A Short Rebuttal to Searle, https://ai.stanford.edu/%7Enilsson/OnlinePubs-Nils/General%2...
I like this quite a bit, and I also wish that Prof. Nilsson were still with us to comment on current LLMs and other systems.
See my past comments here for some background - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40479388
This is how i work it out;
1) "Consciousness" defined as attribute-less pure awareness/witness and immutable "Self" (aka Purusha in Samkhya) will never be possible in AI/AGI.
2) All other human mental states which are mutable and considered as evolutes of Prakriti in Samkhya are possible in AI/AGI. A simple mapping would be;
2.1) Buddhi in Samkhya ~ Metacognition - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metacognition
2.2) Manas in Samkhya ~ Phenomenology - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phenomenology_(psychology)
2.3) Ahamkara in Samkhya ~ Emergent property from above due to "I Think therefore I am".
Now realize that (1) is purely experiential/internal and only (2) is observable from an external pov and you get the idea why AI/AGI may seem "Conscious" (in the common usage of the word) to external observers.
Not quite; it is testable through experience by following any number of practices, prescribed in detail in various texts. There is also empirical evidence in the form of changes in physiological and mental parameters in somebody who has attained that state.
See Effects of Meditation - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Effects_of_meditation
Also see The effect of meditation on regulation of internal body states - https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/psychology/articles/10....
The problem is that the physiological parameters are biological in nature while the mental states can only be observed by indirect means i.e. changes in external observed behaviour mapped to changes in mental states. It is up to us to define these parameters in a precise manner so that we can maybe generalize them to non-humans. A good example would be, what parameters of Metacognition can be delimited precisely so that we can say "A Machine Thinks"? Pattern recognition, drawing inferences, prediction is certainly one but not enough. In a very very narrow and limited sense you could define it as "Thinking" but certainly not "Conscious".
As Dijkstra said; "The question of whether a computer can think is no more interesting than the question of whether a submarine can swim". The point is that concepts like "Thinking", "Consciousness" etc. have to be redefined when it comes to non-humans. What Samkhya gives is a very precise definition of Consciousness in Humans which we can use as a framework to start from.
I'm not sure cultivating our minds will buy much time there. But they will never be an exact replacement in the same way humans are not an exact replacement for cats and dogs in spite of being smarter.