It directly parallels your argument.
> Can you be straight with me? You know the salient difference between asserting the consciousness of a toaster and the consciousness of an AI, right? It isn't a mystery to you why we would find one line of inquiry interesting and the other not so much?
There are two aspects here.
1. That people find the question interesting
2. That it has any bearing on reality (ontology?)
The first aspect is anthropology. Russel’s Teapot is not supposed to undercut any anthropological arguments. It’s supposed to undercut the second aspect.
So far you have said that the argument is compelling. What’s that got to do with reality? A robot cow could be sexually arousing to a real bull.
> For instance, it's probably a real possibility in your mind that I am not a human and am an AI. But you probably aren't entertaining the hypothesis that I'm a toaster.
Yeah. AIs know how to use computers. What’s this got to do with consciousness? Whether or not you are an AI is practical and disprovable. Consciousness is so ephemeral (for lack of a better word, not literally) that Philosophical Zombies is a real argument/thought experiment.
You may think I’m being coy (“Can you be straight with me”) but that’s not my intent at all.
Much like Russel argued that the burden of proof of God's existence is on theists, the burden to establish this parallel is on you as the person forwarding the argument. I don't see any relevant connection. Russel isn't arguing that a teapot is as real as God in the same way it's disputed here that a toaster is as conscious as an LLM.
> So far you have said that the argument is compelling. What’s that got to do with reality? A robot cow could be sexually arousing to a real bull.
AI is a real phenomenon that we can study and measure. There is no experiment that anyone has devised can determine whether or not they are conscious, so that is the reality - uncertainty. That doesn't mean they're conscious. It means that the belief they are not conscious is assumption.
You might say the same of a toaster, but these hypothesis are not equally strong. The toaster doesn't exhibit any behaviors to suggest that it's conscious. Consciousness isn't a hypothesis with any explanatory power for the observed behaviors of a toaster. It's not a hypothesis that's on the table. That's why the analogy doesn't work.
To put a fine point on it, it appears on it's face that AIs could be conscious. They can put on a very convincing performance of being a person. A sufficiently convincing performance is indistinguishable from the real thing. So at face value, the burden of proof is on them not being conscious. Reductionist arguments that present the mechanics of how they work and leap to their not being conscious don't work, because there is no law saying a statistical model can't be conscious. That's an assumption, not knowledge.
I pointed out the parallel in both statements. I can't do more than that.
> Russel isn't arguing that a teapot is as real as God in the same way it's disputed here that a toaster is as conscious as an LLM.
The teapot isn't real and the toaster consciousness is not real. What am I missing?
> AI is a real phenomenon that we can study and measure.
Robot cows are real as well.
> There is no experiment that anyone has devised can determine whether or not they are conscious, so that is the reality - uncertainty. That doesn't mean they're conscious. It means that the belief they are not conscious is assumption.
Yeah. You can't prove it for any entity. I agree.
> You might say the same of a toaster, but these hypothesis are not equally strong. The toaster doesn't exhibit any behaviors to suggest that it's conscious. Consciousness isn't a hypothesis with any explanatory power for the observed behaviors of a toaster. It's not a hypothesis that's on the table. That's why the analogy doesn't work.
The bull swears that the robot cow is a real cow. But we know better.
> To put a fine point on it, it appears on it's face that AIs could be conscious.
It doesn't to me. Not any facelength.
> They can put on a very convincing performance of being a person. A sufficiently convincing performance is indistinguishable from the real thing.
Objective reality has never cared (am I anthropomorphizing now?) what is indistinguishable for people.
> So at face value, the burden of proof is on them not being conscious.
Which party is the burden of proof on? This is confusing since you are saying that the burden of proof is on a position (on them not being conscious).
Is the burden of proof on people who argue that they are n o t conscious? That's peculiar.
I have never heard about any principle in philosophy or in science that says that, given enough Looks Like A Duck points, it is a duck. Based on subjective experience, even.
We obviously can't demand a falsifiable theory here. But we have to do better than arguing from incredulity.
> Reductionist arguments that present the mechanics of how they work and leap to their not being conscious don't work, because there is no law saying a statistical model can't be conscious. That's an assumption, not knowledge.
They don't have to rise to the level of disproving something for which they have no burden to disprove.
> I have never heard about any principle in philosophy or in science that says that, given enough Looks Like A Duck points, it is a duck. Based on subjective experience, even.
Also, you say this like "duck" isn't an arbitrary, artificial category created by humans, a "map not the reality" if you will.
There's very few things that humans can understand to the level of putting them into truly objective scientific categories (various pure elements maybe?), everything else we more or less bodge together for the sake of getting on with life.
It's not like conscious has some kind of formal objective provable definition, even inside the world of human created language and terms.
As far as I know, in the real world, if something looks enough like a duck (and can breed with a duck maybe) we, humans, do call it a duck.
You mean these statements?
No one cares about teapots in space either (Russel).
Teapots are not compelling.
> Which party is the burden of proof on? This is confusing since you are saying that the burden of proof is on a position (on them not being conscious).
It's metonymy. "X" stands in for "people who argue for X". May I ask if you were sincerely confused? You told me you aren't being coy but I have a hard time believing that this was so unclear.
> I have never heard about any principle in philosophy or in science that says that, given enough Looks Like A Duck points, it is a duck. Based on subjective experience, even.
If it looks like a duck, if it quacks like a duck, you should adjust your priors to assign a higher likelihood that it is a duck. All measurements contain error; you can't ever observe, "that is a duck," only "that looks like a duck". All knowledge is founded on a sufficiently deep stack of "looking like a duck" that we may assert it with confidence.
To the extent we have objective measures (like conducting a Turing test on blind participants), it can meet them too. You can't say the same of a toaster.
> We obviously can't demand a falsifiable theory here. But we have to do better than arguing from incredulity.
"It is a statistical model, ergo it is not conscious" is also an argument from incredulity. I don't know if that's your view or not but it's the one my remarks have been addressing in general.