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Comment by SpicyLemonZest | Hacker News Reader

"Car" is a good example of a label that's pretty strictly agreed to. If someone tells me they've developed a new car and then shows me a motorcycle, it's easy to prove that it's not a car, even though many of its engineering principles and functional components are identical to those in cars.

With consciousness, on the other hand, there doesn't seem to be any motorcycle-equivalent. Essentially everyone I've discussed the issue with (myself included) expects that any mind which runs on similar principles to ours or has similar thoughts to our thoughts is conscious.

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You really don't have much experience in philosophy of language do you? It's notoriously hard to pin down the edges of such terms, even something like car or table.

Is a Reliant Robin a car or a tricycle? If it's a car, why aren't other tricycles? What about a side-car of a motorcycle? What about an APC? What's the distinction between a flying car and a plane?

It's hard to pin down the edges of any term, but there exist things which are car-like and yet universally agreed not to be cars. That's what I claim doesn't exist for consciousness.

Describing something as "car-like" is begging the question. You are presupposing an objective definition for "car" in order to draw a distinction between things that are cars, and things that are almost cars. The reason such a thing doesn't exist for consciousness is that people believe that the offered definitions for consciousness are illegitimate. It would seem logically weird for me to accept that a term is "real" if it crosses some percentage of public acceptance of the definition, and not real otherwise. I would argue that using that heuristic would make it very obvious that computers are not conscious because it's a stance that practically everybody takes outside of hackernews.

In the US, we have redefined a lot of our "cars" to be "trucks" instead so they don't have to meet cafe standards.

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