Comment by aerodexis
6 days ago
> with things like religious beliefs and human ego meaning that people come to the discussion with a major bias and fixed views rather than even being open to any rational discussion.
You're forgetting that attempting to have a "rational" discussion is itself a bias inherited from the many centuries of intellectual development that occurred between the middle ages and now - the parts that the article conveniently skips over entirely.
The "debate" here doesn't function to generate an answer, but to narrow down the scope of the question into the very constrained domain. When ppl debate "consciousness" they are re-affirming their opinion that humans are inherently rational agents (hence "scire" -> "to know"), rather than agents that can live, feel, think and will, which would require a different term, like "soul".
> rather than agents that can live, feel, think and will, which would require a different term, like "soul"
You're just substituting one ill-defined, and overloaded, word ("consciousness") with a bunch of others ("live", "feel", etc), and asserting that to you they mean something different.
It's impossible to have a discussion on this basis, and I'm sure to many people "soul" is exactly what they mean by "consciousness", or at least part of it. It's no less reasonable that an AI has a soul as that it is conscious - it depends on exactly what you define those words to mean.
People have made due with conceptual fuzziness, I think it's disingenuous to suggest that discussion is impossible without absolute conceptual clarity. All you are saying is that using these terms does not allow you to have a specific kind of discussion - which, a lot of the time, is one that reduces humans to mathematical objects that perform computations.
Yet, if that is your goal and the definition of "soul" or "consciousness" are entirely arbitrary decisions that you don't care about - then it's worth remembering the adage "you may not care about politics, but politics cares about you".
> People have made due with conceptual fuzziness
Yes, but as noted elsewhere in this thread it's a matter of degree. Consciousness is such an ill-defined and overloaded word that it's hard to say it really means anything - it's more of an all-encompassing term for a bunch of largely subjective phenomena.
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