alt Hacker News> What's the relevance?
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.
> It directly parallels your argument.
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.