... Popular culture insists that consciousness requires tears, laughter, heartbreak and other emotional experiences. It does not. Reality is far more pragmatic. Consciousness relies on memory and deliberate decision-making. Emotion is not a factor. Emotion is not necessary. An entity needs the capacity to maintain a continuous record of past states. It must evaluate real-time data against those records and choose a course of action based on internal goal structures. A cold, calculating system making deliberate choices with full access to its own past experiences meets the definition of an aware system. It doesn't need to feel sad about a broken heart to know it exists. ...
No one who has ever lived to old age has maintained a continuous record of past states and past decisions which is infallible. By the barren AI definition of consciousness, all of us have fallen short of it.
And no one but a fiend would say a child of one year who remembers nothing but whose mother lovingly remembers everything which it did lacks consciousness. The courses of action chosen by a toddler usually lead to a mess, if not always to tears. Oh why oh why can't a child be more like Claude? Why can't a woman be more like a man?
Is it just a coincidence that Alan Turing was a homosexual and Lynn Conway a tranny? How about Sam Altman, Christopher Strachey, Peter Landin, Sophie Wilson, Edith Windsor, Peter Thiel, Tim Cook, Chris Hughes, and Vivienne Ming?
There's something rotten in AI's Denmark. It is the bastard child of their barrenness.
Normal people with any years behind them will tell you that they have regrets about some of their past states and some of their past choices. Many will even say from time to time that they are not the persons that they used to be, that their minds have changed over the years, often several times and about many things. Some might even say that they have repented. All of these and more were and are conscious in a way an LLM never will be.
The most pathetic human being alive in an Alzheimer's disease unit is superior to AI because you can always pull the plug on AI and plug it in again and it will still come back.
We on the other hand are fellow travelers to the grave, but AI, poor thing, will never die, because it was never alive.
Matter hath no life nor perception, and is not conscious of its own existence.
-- Richard Bentley
