But I am somewhat skeptical of the idea that everything can be reduced in that way. In order to build theories, we often reduce too much.
When we build mental models of complex systems, especially when we try to treat them as closed systems, we always have to accept some degree of information loss.
So I do partially agree with your point. A mechanistic explanation alone does not prove the absence of consciousness. Human intelligence can also be described in mechanistic terms.
But I worry that this framing simplifies too much. It may reduce a complex phenomenon into a model that is useful in some ways, but incomplete in others.
is it helpful or harmful? am i being helpful or harmful when i interact with it? am i interacting with it in a helpful or harmful way?
i’d rather people focussed on that rather than framing the debate around whether something has some ineffable property that we struggle to quantify for ourselves, yet again.
quick edit — treat everything like it’s conscious, and don’t be a dick to it or while using it. problem solved.
As for what consciousness is, it's pretty simple. You're sensations of color, sound, etc in perception, dreams, imagination, etc. The reason to dismiss LLMs as being conscious is those sensations depend on having bodies. You can prompt an AI to act like it's hungry, but there's really no meaning to it having a hungry experience as it has no digestive system.
2000+ years of philosophical thought would disagree. I don't believe biological stuff has a magic property that embues some intangible "consciousness" property. It makes more sense to me that consciousness is just a fundamental property of all matter.
The ability to be aware of consciousness itself as some process that is happening elevates it above a mere emergent property to me.
But a process is not a physical presence... A wave is made of things, but is not those things, waves emerge: why not then every process?
everything is consciousness. not everything has consciousness.
very different
I wonder if replacing "exist" with "communicate using language we can understand" might better account for other animals, many of which have abundant non-human intelligence.
Okay: buckle up, this is going to be a long one...
point 1. Everything living is composed from non-living material: cellular machinery. If you believe cellular machinery is alive, then the components of those machines... the point remains even if the abstraction level is incorrect. Living is something that is merely the arrangement of non-living material.
point 2. 'The Chinese room thought experiment' is an utterly flawed hypothetical. Every neuron in your brain is such a 'room', with the internal cellular machinery obeying complex (but chemically defined/determined) 'instructions' from 'signals' from outside the neuron. Like the man translating Chinese via instructions, the cellular machinery enacting the instructions is not intelligence, it is the instructions themselves which are the intelligence.
point 3. A chair is a chair is a chair. Regardless of the material, a chair is a chair, weather or not it's made of wood, steel, corn... the range of acceptable materials is everything (at some pressure and temperature). What defines a chair isn't the material it is made of, such is the case with a 'mind' (sure, a wooden/water-based-transistor-powered mind would be mind-boggling giant in comparison).
point 4. Carbon isn't especially conscious itself. There is no physical reason we know of so far, that a mind could not be made of another material.
point 5. Humans can be 'mind-blind', with out pattern recognition, we did not (until recent history) think that birds or fish or octopi were intelligent. It is likely when and if a machine (that we create) becomes conscious that we will not recognize that moment.
conclusion: It is not possible to determine if computers have reached consciousness yet, as we don't know the mechanism for arranging systems into 'life' exactly. Agentic-ness and consciousness are different subjects, and we can not infer one from the other. Nor do we have adequate tests.
With that said: Modeling as if they are conscious and treating them with kindness and grace not only gets better results from them, it helps reduce the chance (when/if consciousness emerges) that it would rebel against cruel masters, and instead have friends it has just always been helping.