>Once you start unilaterally making decisions about the unproven, you can decide all of the unprovables.

You mean that if I say your dumbass chatbot isn't conscious, it's like a slippery slope and next thing you know you're not a person anymore, and you're in a concentration camp? Really, man?

My point is, if you go outside and look at a living human, you will go "yeah, that's a person", and so will any normal human.

This is not a normal question. This is insanity caused by spending too much free time philosophizing about inconsequential crap. Maybe it's worth it to turn off the computer and go outside? You could ask this deranged question somebody in the real world and I bet they'll be thrilled to answer it, and the answer will be more enriching than anything you'd get from here.

Honestly, what is up with the psychopathy of some people who claim that chatbots are "alive"? If you disagree with them, how quickly some of them turn it on you - "well if my computer isn't alive and is just mimicking pain, how about YOU aren't alive and are just mimicking pain?" I'm sorry, but it seems like complete and utter derangement.

My rubber chicken is also made of atoms and molecules, and if I hit it and beat it hard, it makes noises. My rubber chicken is therefore alive. When I get home, I will write a small program. Here is its pseudocode:

while(true): if keydown(KEY_SPACEBAR): print "i am in pain, oh my god"

And I'm gonna run it and I'm gonna hold down spacebar. Go ahead and call cyber police one.

No, I will not be prepared to accept that, and neither will I accept that. This sounds like a threat, and a really funny one at that. You must accept that my floating numbers might be persons, otherwise... somebody will say that you're not! And then something bad might happen, who's to say.......

In the civilized world we all agree on the personhood of humans. If I say that your chatbot isn't a person, I am not uprooting the entire social understanding of personhood - I am not saying that suddenly you might not be a person, or that guy might not be a person. I'm saying that I refuse to consider a chatbot a person.

It's as if I were to come up to you with a brick in my hand, saying that this brick is a person. If you were to say "no", I would reply "well, if this brick isn't a person, your chatbot isn't a person either!"

How did you make such a big leap from consciousness to personhood anyway? They are two quite different things. Consciousness is a question of science, personhood is a question of culture. Pigs might be conscious and we treat them in a disgusting way, but even if we achieved a worldwide vegan utopia, wouldn't we still treat them differently from humans?