alt Hacker News> just treat anything which claims to be conscious as conscious.
Doesn't seem like a very good metric.
A piece of paper with the words "I am conscious" claims to be conscious. A dog does not claim to be conscious.
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> Doesn't seem like a very good metric.
I don't claim to be able to define it. I just know that we have a fairly binary choice here. When people can't agree then the cost benefit should make the decision until people can align.
With machine consciousness one path leads us to p-zombie's and Holocausts. The other might cost someone $50 or a few extra keystrokes.
Sorry, but folks can just open up their wallets until we can align on an answer.
The global warming debate is similar. Is global warming man-made? Who cares. We have a binary choice: "do nothing" or "do something".
If we do nothing we risk preventable extinction. If we do something it might cost a few bucks for no good reason. The choice is clear.
You can apply it to the dog example as well. Could a reasonable person think dogs are conscious? Yes. So we should be nice to them.
The cost of being kind is low and if we get it wrong we risk torturing a conscious being.
> A dog does not claim to be conscious.
So you need to handle that somehow, but you can't just patch dogs (or octopuses) into "conscious" group, because you can draw a straight line between humans and bacteria and, along pretty much any obvious metric you choose, there's thousands if not millions of species of life forms currently existing to uniformly space through intermediary points. If the border between "conscious" and "unconscious" includes humans in the "conscious" set and bacteria in "unconscious", then you need to explain why the two animals closest to it on either side are where transition happens.