alt Hacker NewsThat is a good way to think about it. At some point, this becomes partly a matter of philosophical belief.
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.
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Historically we have used intelligence as a way to distinguish man from animal and human from machine. We rely upon it to determine who has our best interests at heart vs who is trying to do us in. Obviously that all changes if we invent an intelligence (conscious or not) that shares the planet with us. Through this lens the term consciousness (through a few more leaps) becomes the question of “is it capable of love and if so does it love us” and if it doesn’t, then it is a malevolent alien intelligence. If it was capable of love, why would it love us? I make a point of being polite to LLM’s where not completely absurd, overly because I don’t want my clipped imperative style to leak into day to day, but also covertly, you just never know …
this whole consciousness thing is fairly easy to put to bed if you run with the ideas from things like buddhism that everything is consciousness. then none of us have to bother with silly, distracting arguments about something that ultimately does not matter.
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.