Any number of things can serve as a basic vocabulary to postulate entities, and do so in a textured way that matches some parts of underlying physical reality.

It's tempting to look at this and make the tragic jump into anti-realism because of the interchangeability of so many forms of representation. But I think as long as you have a combination of pragmatic attitude, treat knowledge claims as provisional and converging on truth, there's a cash value to descriptions that makes them legitimately truth tracking regardless of how they're formed.

I think this is a fantastic point and this kind of complexifying can and will happen. And I think future of online debating and propaganda is going to complexify in a similar way.

I will say though, I think that can be controlled by building in principles that prefer competing theories on the grounds of cogency, and that cancel out competing theories by reducing them to the parts between them that are equivalent.

My hard disagree will be with this: I don't think at all that we would "never" have got to the theory of relativity. It reminds me a bit of the "embodied cognition" argument against simulated brains. That argument suggests you can't "just" simulate brains, because actual brains are the totality of their embodiment in bodies and environments. Regardless of whether you agree with that line of thinking (I don't), we can assume it's true, and change the target of our simulation to brains + bodies + environments. The problem is bigger, but still perfectly amenable to the same methods.

I think the same is true of theorizing about science and imposing metatheoretical constraints. I think you can optimize for healthy hypothesis production just like you can for first-order reasoning about data. It's definitely harder but not necessarily a difference in kind.

Well to your point, youtube already has these little mini games that exist in portrait mode. Seems like something is liminally out there pointing in that direction.

>aware of it when it is happening

Oops, you agreed with me. But sorry if I was not clear. You are right, pain in the moment matters, and that harm is not neutralized just because you forgot about it.

Edit: A fascinating and terrifying, and probably wrong, interpretation of anaesthesia I once heard is that perhaps the effect it has on people isn't that it numbs the pain but that it makes you forget it. I don't think that's true, but if it worked that way, I wouldn't consider it an acceptable solution.

Instead, try the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy's entry which inventories several different conceptions of consciousness including ones that don't obviously depend on self awareness. Under section 2, Concepts of Consciousness it notes the following varieties: Sentience, Wakefulness, Self-consciousness, What it is like, Subject of conscious states, and especially transitive consciousness which most closely approximates what I was talking about:

>Transitive Consciousness. In addition to describing creatures as conscious in these various senses, there are also related senses in which creatures are described as being conscious of various things. The distinction is sometimes marked as that between transitive and intransitive notions of consciousness, with the former involving some object at which consciousness is directed (Rosenthal 1986).

https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/consciousness/

Even your Websters citation includes many of these varieties under the top definition you cited!

And/or that they might not be now, but we can't rule out in principle that some future way of building machines that makes it possible.

Defining consciousness would be something we're only capable of doing once we solve it rather than something to do at the beginning. I also think it "how do we define X" is a trap that sounds deeper than it is, because for some questions it gets the order of operations reversed.

I think what causes people to go off the rails when considering things like potential plant consciousness, life in remote places in the universe, and computer consciousness, is conflating (1) the open ended possibility that some new discovery might challenge how we classify things, with (2) a hard earned conclusion that realizes and cashes out such an example in specifics.

I think people mistakenly treat hesitance to proceed with (2) like it's a failure to appreciate (1).

There's the rub right there. I see this argument also made in the context of some animals, and I just don't think it runs at all. I think what it comes down to is that some harms are experiential and intrinsically tied to awareness. Pain you're not aware of isn't pain.

But there's another category, which is something like your access to your own agency, your "budget" of life and choices at your disposal that you can spend on your own behalf, which isn't itself experienced but part of the reserve of welfare at your disposal that you have an interest in maintaining. And extinguishing that budget constitutes a loss in and of itself, and it's the fact of it being lost that is the harm, not just awareness. But I think it's easy to get confused about this because awareness that, say, you have at lot less time to live than you expected can be distressing, but it's a separate kind of harm from the fact of that loss itself.

I disagree and would turn the tables on that framing: it's anthropocentric to think that such things as ethically significant states of being belong exclusively to humans. I don't disagree that machines could be conscious in different ways, but I don't think it's necessary that ethical significance itself belongs uniquely to humans. Although to be fair maybe you're not going that fair and you're just talking about contingencies of how LLMs are structured.

Consciousness without valenced states seems possible, and if anything were to have that kind of consciousness I would wager it would be machines.

I kind of agree and disagree. I think in principle we can imagine "direct" tests if we feel we really need such a thing. The problem is, as a practical matter of investigating, it's just exceptionally hard, the way that things like germ theory and the complexities of viruses, bacteria, and the immune system were hard to probe in previous eras.

I think in 2026 we are caught in an era where, for better or worse, we don't have some capabilities that at least are notionally possible to imagine: cases like conjoined twins sharing parts of their brain, or artificial brain to brain interfaces, and even machine to brain interfaces, could seemingly test this in robust ways. But they have every appearance of being sci-fi horror stories that are ethically unacceptable.

But I do think there's an important difference between it being really hard and being impossible to probe in principle. I also think a good theory of consciousness could tie the philosophical idea of qualitativeness to an equivalent character of physical reality (e.g. Russellian monism), and a combination of good philosophy and empirical understanding could set us up for meaningful knowledge claims.

Even now, we can, for instance, push back on claims of plant or slime mold consciousness, because you can search for something like an outward appearance of intelligence, but once you investigate internal structure you don't see things like internal world state or any equivalent to internal informational representation or deliberation in response to world states, you see automatic biological reflexes. So I don't think our only options are assuming it's unknowable in principle.

I think this is unfortunately massively off the rails, and hence articles like this probing what exactly they believe are necessary, for better and/or worse. I think the problem is there's a lot of information processing/world understanding/reasoning that lurks in the weights and in the training, and there are abundant ways to analogize that to hallmarks of consciousness in living creatures, but for those arguments to fully work they have to cash out as more than merely analogies, but the "AI is conscious" arguments remain permanently in the purgatory of an inconclusive gray area, and I think the confidence is out of proportion to the data.