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Bill Gye's avatar

Thanks Paul, excellent outline of convergent and divergent evolution. I does seem that ChatGPT is just a clever “imitaton”, but because:

(a) the “hard problem” of what makes consciousness (or entities are conscious) is still “hard” (and I believe unsolved), then

(b) one of several candidates could be the case, and thus

(c) because one of those candidates is that any complex system with the quantity of nodes, connections and feedback circuits similar to a human (or even planetarium worm brain) might be sufficient for the “emergence” of consciousness, then ..

(d) it might be that a highly complex AI “dark cloud” will mysteriously generate its own silver lining of emerging shiny sentience (i.e. we can’t say).

So, while “all that twitters may not be gold” it could equally be the case that every complex “dark cloud might have a sentient lining”.

Of course if such an AI system was to be embodied and able to sense and move around in our environment and then set free to evolve, it may through convergent evolution be even more likely to develop some form of consciousness, though even then (because of the “other minds” problem) we would still never really know “what it is like to be a robot”.

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