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

> 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.

The teapot isn't real and the toaster consciousness is not real. What am I missing?

> AI is a real phenomenon that we can study and measure.

Robot cows are real as well.

> 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.

Yeah. You can't prove it for any entity. I agree.

> 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.

The bull swears that the robot cow is a real cow. But we know better.

> To put a fine point on it, it appears on it's face that AIs could be conscious.

It doesn't to me. Not any facelength.

> They can put on a very convincing performance of being a person. A sufficiently convincing performance is indistinguishable from the real thing.

Objective reality has never cared (am I anthropomorphizing now?) what is indistinguishable for people.

> So at face value, the burden of proof is on them not being conscious.

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).

Is the burden of proof on people who argue that they are n o t conscious? That's peculiar.

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.

We obviously can't demand a falsifiable theory here. But we have to do better than arguing from incredulity.

> 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.

They don't have to rise to the level of disproving something for which they have no burden to disprove.