Three Views on Consciousness
With the rise of generative AI we've all seen a lot of discussion about whether AIs could be conscious, now or in the future. While many of these discussions are productive I've seen others that look more like the proverbial youths arguing about the question "If a tree falls in the forest and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound?" That's not a question you can just answer, but by realizing that "sound" can mean both an auditory experience and a sequence of vibrations in the air and so dissolve the question , satisfying our curiosity without answering it directly. I don't see us having any hope at this moment of dissolving the much harder questions around artificial consciousness, but I do hope that recognizing that the term "consciousness" can mean different things in different philosophical and scientific systems can make discussion more productive. I see three major schools of thought there which I'll call ...