alt Hacker NewsSo is a person suffering from amnesia conscious if they lack short-term and long-term memory?
Ruling out consciousness or qualia emerging from the inference in an LLM is just as invalid of a take as being 100% certain of its consciousness. We don’t know what consciousness really is, so only thing we can say with certainty is we do not know.
No, by continuity I mean literally moment to moment. Sorry if I didn’t clarify that. Even people with amnesia are still present moment to moment. As far as I know there are no things that we call conscious which have zero continuity.
I think consciousness is not an abstract property in the world, therefore it’s tied to certain types of entities. Therefore an AI is not going to be “conscious” in the way an animal is, and never will be. This is a failing of specific language. Maybe the machines can be aware, input data, mimic what we see as consciousness, etc. but the metaphor of consciousness really doesn’t fit. A jet can move faster than an eagle but it’s not moving in the same way. We simply lack a sophisticated enough language to easily differentiate the two.