Would you agree, for the sake of argument, that it's more interesting to discus chatgpt 5.5's similarity to sentient/sapient/conscious than, say, my mechanical toaster?

> 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.

> I pointed out the parallel in both statements. I can't do more than that.

You mean these statements?

    No one cares about teapots in space either (Russel).

    Teapots are not compelling.

I guess you did but that's pretty much leaving me breadcrumbs and expecting me to make your argument for you. It seemed to me like you were talking about reductio ad absurdum with that argument as an illustrative example. Perhaps you overestimate my cleverness.

> 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.