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Rygian

Here's one "philosopher" 's test:

Can it feel hunger, thirst, pain, sexual desire, fear, tiredness?

If yes to any of the previous: does it have agency to address and satisfy those feelings?

If yes to any of the previous: is it able to willingly delay instant gratification?

If yes: conscious.

If not: instincts-based being.

Note: you will find it challenging to agree on definitions of the words "feel", "satisfy", "willingly" and probably all the rest.

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You are already in some trouble at step one - how do you figure out if something has any of those feelings? Just asking or observing the behavior does not seem good enough, one can easily write a program that prints »Yes, I am tired, I need some sleep.« and with more effort one could build a robot that behaves as if it was tired.

On the other hand I have a lot of sympathy for something I heard the first time from Daniel Dennett, that something like pain is just the sum of its effects. It occupies your mind and prevents you from thinking clearly, it makes you not move or touch the body part that hurts, it dulls other sense, and so on. If you removed all those effects, what would be left of pain? With that understanding you could probably probe if something is experiencing pain from the outside by looking for those effects.

These needs are often conflicting, so satisfying these needs me delaying others. Your definition makes all animals conscious (which tbf I may not disagree with, but i think you do). This is before getting into what an instinct is.

OK. Going along with the thought experiment here:

So would someone subjected to some damage that makes them unable to act stop being conscious?

Let's take Bob who can feel that shopping list of emotions and has agency to address them and can delay gratification.

And we tie him to a chair and medicate his somatic nervous system so that he can sense, but not act. Has he stopped being conscious?

Here is a counter example to your test. If we view an entire nation as one entity, especially considering the perspective of other nations in terms of diplomatic relationships, the nation would satisfy all requirements in your test. However, I don’t think most people believe that a nation has continuous consciousness which outlives all of its citizens for hundreds or even thousands of years. This argument can be applied to any large organization or a group of people.

It is not a strong counterexample, IMO. More of a reason to treat nations as conscious beings.

Your definition makes a Sims NPC conscious. Wich I have no problem with, personally, but kind of makes the whole experiment trivial.

"sexual desire"

So an asexual human is not conscious.

"pain"

There are humans that have their pain receptors ablated due to genetic condition. Are they not conscious?

if a human could not feel hunger, thirst, pain, sexual desire, fear, tiredness, or literally anything else, they'd be considered braindead. we already don't consider them conscious.

Let's say you artificially meet or restrict the biological basis of the needs.

E.g. put the subject on a drip so that none of the hunger senses are triggered. Automatically manage the body's water balance with sensors and a feeding tube. Restrict them so that they can't hurt themselves to feel pain. Modulate their sexual hormones to inhibit sexual desire. Etc., etc.

Do they stop being conscious?

They still have the capacity to, in this case the experiment is being set up so that a being that COULD pass the test on their own CAN NOT when hooked up to a bunch of equipment.

So someone with a medical condition that causes them to be a vegetable without being connected to a machine wouldn't be conscious?

E.g. Let's imagine we get some cybernetic approach that can work around an inoperable deep brain tumour in the brainstem.

Without the prosthesis the person is in a coma or dead. With it they are normal, but need to be connected to the prosthesis.

The following lines say "any of", not "all of". Lack of one particular feeling does not imply lack of consciousness. Lack of all of them probably would.

That's not how I read the word any in that statement, it was used to narrow the condition.

I mean I can easily train a model to say it feels those things, which is experimentally indistinguishable. I focus on the first part your or comment because the second part is clearly satisfied by an LLM inside a suitable harness.

Also there are people who for whatever reason don't feel at least one of those things, we do not doubt their consciousness.

op said "any" not all

Any was used to mean "even if you had any of these.."

If you train a model to say it feels those things, then you are forcing an unconventional definition of the word "feel".

If you satisfy the second part thanks to a suitable harness, then you agree it is not an emergent property of the AI itself, but rather an add-on tacked in.

So by your definition most animals are not conscious?

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