[FRIAM] Is consciousness measurable?

[glen]

There are many different measures of *types* of consciousness. But without specifying the type, such questions are not even philosophical. They're nonsense.

For example, the test of whether one can recognize one's image in a mirror couldn't be performed by a chatbot. But it is one of the measures of consciousness. Another type of test would be those that measure conscious state before, during, and after anesthesia. Again, that wouldn't work the same for a chatbot. But both aggregate measures like EEG and fMRI connectomes might have analogs in tracing for algorithms like ANNs. If we could simply decide "Yes, *that* chatbot is what we're going to call conscious and, therefore, the traced patterns it exhibits in the profiler are the correlates for chatbot consciousness." Then we'd have a trace-based test to perform on other chatbots *with similar computational structure*.

Hell, the cops have their tests for consciousness executed at drunk driving checkpoints. Look up and touch your nose. Recite the alphabet backwards. Etc. These are tests for types of consciousness. Of course, I feel sure there are people who'd like to move the goal posts and claim "That's not Consciousness with a big C." Pffft. No typology ⇒ no science. So if someone can't list off a few distinct types of consciousness, then it's not even philosophy.

On 10/18/22 13:12, Jochen Fromm wrote:
> Paul Buchheit asked on Twitter
> https://twitter.com/paultoo/status/1582455708041113600
> 
> "Is consciousness measurable, or is it just a philosophical concept? If an AI claims to be conscious, how do we know that it's not simply faking/imitating consciousness? Is there something that I could challenge it with to prove/disprove consciousness?"
> 
> What do you think? Interesting question.
> 
> -J.


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