This article really takes umbridge with those that conflate phenomenological and access consciousness. However that is essentially dualism. It's a valid philosophical position to believe that there is no distinct phenomenological consciousness besides access consciousness.
Abandoning dualism feels intuitively wrong, but our intuition about our own minds is frequently wrong. Look at the studies that show we often believe we made a decision to do an action that was actually a pure reflex. Just the same, we might be misunderstanding our own sense of "the light being on".
The dilemma is, the one thing we can be sure of, is our subjectivity. There is no looking through a microscope to observe matter empirically, without a subjective consciousness to do the looking.
So if we're eschewing the inelegance / "spooky magic" of dualism (and fair enough), we either have to start with subjectivity as primitive (idealism/pan-psychism), deriving matter as emergent (also spooky magic); or, try to concoct a monist model in which subjectivity can emerge from non-subjective building blocks. And while the latter very well might be the case, it's hard to imagine it could be falsifiable: if we constructed an AI or algo which exhibits verifiable evidence of subjectivity, how would we distinguish that from imitating such evidence? (`while (true) print "I am alive please don't shut me down"`).
If any conceivable imitation is necessarily also conscious, we arrive at IIT, that it is like something to be a thermostat. If that's the case, it's not exactly satisfying, and implies a level of spooky magic almost indistinguishable from idealism.
It sounds absurd to modern western ears, to think of Mind as a primitive to the Universe. But it's also just as magical and absurd that there exists anything at all, let alone a material reality so vast and ordered. We're left trying to reconcile two magics, both of whose existences would beggar belief, if not for the incontrovertible evidence of our subjectivity.
Intuition is highly personal. Many people believe that abandoning monism feels intuitively wrong and that dualism is an excuse for high minded religiosity.
Leibniz seems to get to high-minded religiosity fine with monadology and still dodge dualism. I'm probably overdue to try and grapple with this stuff again, since I think you'd have to revisit it pretty often to stay fresh. But I'll hazard a summary: phenomena exist, and both the soul of the individual and God exist too, necessarily, as a kind of completion or closure. A kind of panpsychism that's logically rigorous and still not violating parsimony.
AI folks honestly need to look at this stuff (and Wittgenstein) a bit more, especially if you think that ML and Bayes is all about mathematically operationalizing Occam. Shaking down your friendly neighborhood philosopher for good axioms is a useful approach
I think you misunderstood GP, they don't seem to be a fan of dualism either and are in fact defending it as a valid position. The point about intuitive feeling was just a polite concession.
It takes umbridge with those who conflate the topics within the computational framework. The article specifically de-scopes the "supernatural" bin, because "If consciousness comes from God, then God only knows whether AIs have it".
So sure, dualism is a valid philosophical position in general, but not in this context. Maybe, as I believe you're hinting, someone could use the incompatibility or intractability of the two consciousness types as some sort of disproof of the computational framework altogether or something... I think we're a long way from that though.
i think it's still an open question how "conscious" that infants and newborns are. It really depends on how you define it and it is probably a continuum of some kind.
This is well documented fact, in the medical and cognitive science fields: humans consciousness fade away as their neurons are reduced/malformed/misfunctioning.
You can trivially demonstrate it in any healthy individual using oxygen starvation.
There's no one neuron that results in any definition of human consciousness, which requires that it's a continuum.
For sure, pain is useful when it leads to learning. We learn through feedback from our senses. We're completely dependent upon this mode in the beginning.
As our brains mature, we learn how to predict our environments in ways to maximize pleasure, and avoid pain (grossly oversimplified). We learn more about others, what works, and what doesn't.
An AI also learns from feedback, but is it ever perceiving anything?
Do the physical quanta we call electrons experience the phenomenon we poorly define but generally call consciousness?
If you believe consciousness is a result of material processes: Is the thermodynamic behavior of an electron, as a process, sufficient to bestow consciousness in part or in whole?
If you believe it is immaterial: What is the minimum “thing” that consciousness binds to, and is that threshold above or below the electron? This admittedly asks for some account of the “above/below” ordering, but assume the person answering is responsible for providing that explanation.
It can bind to anything. Human consciousness can temporarily bind to a shovel, and to a gopher who can only perceive things at its level, under the ground, the shovel will appear conscious. Similarly, our body is the outer layer that's temporarily bound to our brain, which in turn is bound to activity within neurons, which in turn is driven by something else. As for the fundamental origin of consciousness, it's at different levels in different people. In some rare examples, the highest level is the electrochemical activity within neurons, so that's their origin of consciousness. Those with the higher level will perceive those below as somewhat mechanical, I guess, as the workings of their consciousness will look observable. On the other hand, consciousness from a higher origin will seem mysteriously unpredictable to those below. Then I think there is a possibility of an infinitely high origin: no matter at which level you inspect it, it will always appear to be just a shell for a consciousness residing one level higher. Some humans may be like that. Things are complicated by the fact that different levels have different laws and time flows: at the level of mechanical gears things can be modeled with simple mechanics, at the level of chemical reactions things become more complicated, then at the level of electrons the laws are completely different, and if electrons are driven by something else then we are lost completely. For example, a watch may be purely mechanical, or it can be driven by a quartz oscillator that also takes input from an accelerometer. I understand that this idea may seem uncomfortable, but the workings of the universe doesn't have to fit the narrow confines of the Turing machines that we know of.
That's a very meta view. There's levels to consciousness for sure, due to intelligence and perception.
But, my mind never leaves my skull so it's definitely bound to my brain and nothing else (ignoring electrical fields).
We can imagine what it's like to be other things, but we can never be sure (and almost certainly would not accurately match reality). Our imagination is bound to our senses, so it's limited. I can't even be sure that the color red that comes to my mind is the same color you see in your mind. As long as our imaginations paint the same color every time red is perceived: we'd be none the wiser and would go on thinkong we see the same thing. And also consider animals that can perceive colors and sounds beyond human range. Does this say anything more about consciousness?
An electron almost certainly is not thinking or aware, but does it perceive? Does a thermostat on a wall perceive temperature? Do AIs perceive anything?
Is perception even useful to think about when trying to define consciousness?
I'm rambling off topic... going back to your points: if something is sufficiently intelligent to understand the workings of a thing: does this automatically place the understood thing in a lower consciousness?
Could a diety, or a force of nature have a higher consciousness than us? Or are we above the force, in terms of consciousness? It doesn't even seem useful to make these comparisons....
I would say yes, that things below us is what we clearly understand and see, and things above us is what we are confused about. For example, the motions of electrons as well as the motions of galaxies is a mystery to us, so any lifeforms at those levels will be above us. Studying them won't be an option, as any meaningful understanding of their ways of life would require consciousness at their level.
When we blow air, the motion of air particles may be studied in a mechanical way, and some intelligent microbes, if such exist, would come to a naive theory of air motion, as they are oblivious to what brings that air into motion. It's understandable, because many generations of those microbes change while we exhale just once. Similarly, what we perceive as magnetism or even the time itself might be some incomprehensible formless lifeform, and it would see us as simple and predictable microbes.
Abandoning dualism feels intuitively wrong, but our intuition about our own minds is frequently wrong. Look at the studies that show we often believe we made a decision to do an action that was actually a pure reflex. Just the same, we might be misunderstanding our own sense of "the light being on".