alt Hacker NewsI thought we were talking about "what is consciousness" rather than "which creatures are conscious." The conversation started with "consciousness is just [a series of material processes resulting in an illusion of interiority, rather than a genuine phenomenon of -- for lack of a better word -- personhood]"
I would probably say "consciousness is the soul" rather than "souls are required for consciousness," but either way I don't see how that helps the fundamental issue that it's impossible to physically prove another creature's interiority, including humans.
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We were talking about "what is consciousness" but rapidly hit an end.
Sorry for the lack of clarity: "which creatures are conscious" was my attempt to switch topics to a line which I had hoped might be mutually interesting.
Cheers!
What I said was that it's all search. We search and learn, search and learn. This feels like consciousness because it is a recurrent process that feeds on itself. We create relational representations from data, and these representations encode the structure of our experiences. In other words embeddings explain away the qualitative aspects of qualia.