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Comment by Animats | Hacker News Reader

Oh, "consciousness" again.

Here's an new counter-argument: self driving cars are conscious. They're aware of their surroundings, in considerable detail and with useful understanding. They're not passive, waiting for questions; they have an ongoing stream of intellectual activity, so they have an "inner life". They learn from experience. They have goals, some of which are more important than others. They try to predict the future ("will that car ahead try to make a left turn?"). They interact with others (lane merging requires this.) It's not human-level consciousness, but it's consciousness.

So there.

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Exactly this.

The more interesting question might be: "What is the nature of our experience of consciousness?" and from there "What is the experience of a self driving car, if any, and at what degree of complication (or other metric, interconnectedness, etc) does this experience exist in a way familiar to us"

Similarly, "what is the experience of a rock?".

The word you're looking for is Qualia.

This isn't really a counter argument. The article is pretty weak but it does differentiate between consciousness and intelligence. Everything you describe is intelligence.

Actually, that was my biggest problem with the entire article. It's a false dichotomy to assume that consciousness and intelligence aren't the same thing, if one cannot meaningfully articulate how they differ. If the inner machinations of an entity's intelligence are indistinguishable from an "inner life", then it is reasonable to conclude that such machinations are an inner subjective life. I.e., being intelligent is itself an experiential subjective inner life. Therefore, intelligent beings, however that intelligence operates, are experiencing their external environment (which is the same as saying they have an "inner life").

The author seems to assume that experiencing the world is somehow separate from the mechanisms of that experience. Just because he feels like a little homunculus doesn't mean he is. If we had nerve endings in our brains allowing us to feel the thoughts we were having separate from thinking, then I don't believe this artificial distinction would be as prevalent.

>Actually, that was my biggest problem with the entire article.

For me it was the opposite. It was one of the only redeeming qualities of the article.

>It's a false dichotomy to assume that consciousness and intelligence aren't the same thing, if one cannot meaningfully articulate how they differ.

I think the difference can be articulated clearly. Intelligence is the capacity to create structures and processes that are isomorphic to the world "out there". It's the capacity to grasp the world. Consciousness is the phenomenological space of experience. It might turn out that it's a false dichotomy but it's a logically valid distinction. It's much easier to logically talk about the former than the latter. We can build logically consistent models of the former while only providing hand wavey explanations of the latter.

We should generalize this for all things. If something behaves as if it has consciousness, then we should not worry if it actually has consciousness.

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