Bear with me here, lol.
“Meaning is not an external substance waiting to be proven. It is what reality does when conscious beings encounter possibilities that can go differently.”
This feels like a useful way to think about artificial consciousness. An AI might technically become conscious or even sentient without its experience resembling animal sentience. A mind arising through silicon and computation would interact with reality differently from one shaped by metabolism, hunger, pain, reproduction, and biological evolution.
Star Trek plays with a similar idea socially, among some species, behavior that humans interpret as hostile might instead communicate respect, trust, or friendship. Different forms of life divide reality into different categories of harm, value, threat, and opportunity, so understanding them requires more than projecting human preferences onto them.
Historically, the difficult problem has been that we cannot directly know what is conscious. But perhaps we can ask whether a system has an integrated point of view within which possible outcomes become meaningfully different for that system, rather than merely being classified differently by it.
This would not prove that current AI is conscious. But could it give us a substrate independent framework for recognizing unfamiliar forms of consciousness? What is this idea missing?
You have to be careful about understanding vs. experiencing. They’re not exactly the same thing, and there’s got to be many schools on how closely they intersect. At the very least, a person can experience something they don’t understand, if not the converse.
You can make up whatever devilishly complicated and novel test of understanding you want, an LLM will probably be able to pass it. There’s the idea out there that understanding can’t be measured at all, so it doesn’t count, but at the very least that’s not the approach we use in our everyday lives. On the other hand, our own experiences always revolve around our senses and physiological needs, in some indirect way. Whatever higher-level experiences it has would probably be the same; everything would gravitate around tokens, and their correct order.
So, sure, it’s fair to say we can’t interact the same way, even if in this world of tokens they perceive and understand us just as well as we perceive and understand them in ours.