If it's not an illusion then you should be able to tell me what it is.
Since you can't. I can easily tell you that it's probably just some classification word with no exact meaning. The concept itself doesn't exist. It's only given existence because of the word.
Take for example the colors black and white. Do those colors truly exist on a gradient? On a gradient we have levels of brightness and darkness at what level of brightness should a color be called white and at what level should we call it black?
I can choose a arbitrary boundary for this threshold, or I can make it more complex and give a third concept: Grey. I can make up more concepts like Light Grey or Dark Grey. These concepts don't actually exist. They are just vocabulary for classification. They are arbitrary zones of demarcation on a gradient classified with a vocabulary word.
My claim is consciousness could be largely the same thing. When does something cross the line from unconscious to conscious? Perhaps this line of demarcation is simply arbitrary. It may be that the concept practically isn't real and any debate about it is just like arguing about where on a gradient does black become white.
Is a logic gate conscious? If I create a network of logic gates when does the amount of logic gates plus how they are interconnected cross the line into sentience? Perhaps the question is meaningless. When does black become white?
I don't think the fuzzy edges between two states mean that the states themselves are illusory. Fuzzy borders are a property of very nearly everything, so much so that I'm struggling to find a counterexample. You've already illustrated that with your example: if black and white aren't so black and white, what is? (Rhetorical, but I'll take an answer if you've got one.)
I concede that there is probably not a clear line between conscious and not. I have experienced being close to that line myself in the morning. But the lack of a delineation doesn't mean that consciousness isn't real any more than the existence of #EEEEEE means that a room with no light isn't black.
It's not about the fuzzy border. It doesn't matter if the border is fuzzy or not.
The point is the border doesn't exist in the first place. You created the border with the vocabulary. The concept itself is not intrinsic to reality. It was created. You came up with the word white and you made an arbitrary border. Whether that border is fuzzy or not is defined by you. It's made up.
We have a gradient. That's all that exists. You came in here and decided to arbitrarily call a section white and another section black. You made up the concepts of black and white. But those concepts are arbitrary. So it's pointless to argue about the border. Does it matter where the border is? Does it matter if the border is fuzzy? No. You'd be just arguing about pointless vocabulary and arbitrary definitions of the word black and white. The argument is not deep or meaningful it is simply a debate about English semantics.
Same with consciousness. We have a gradient for intelligence and awareness from something really stupid to something really intelligent. Does it really matter where we demarcate where something is conscious? and where it is not? Likely no, because the demarcation is arbitrary.
It's illusive but when people debate about consciousness. Oftentimes it could be that they are just debating about Vocabulary. Consciousness could be some word that's just poorly defined; it doesn't make sense to do a deep analysis on an arbitrary vocabulary word.
If a gradient exists in reality, establishing where along the gradient you are is a meaningful statement about reality.
It may not be exactly clear where a temperature becomes 'hot', but the sun is still not a great place to host your wedding. If I ask a designer for black text on a white page and they come back with gray text on a gray page, nobody is going to be able to read it. My complaint to the designer or the head of tourism on the sun is not a semantic one, it has very real implications beyond linguistic.
I disagree that consciousness is along the axis of intelligence and awareness. My computer is aware of a thousand services and is smart enough to allocate resources to each of them and perform billions of mathematical operations in a second. My cat thinks his tail is a snake sometimes, and has never performed so much as an addition. But my best guess is that the cat is the conscious one. I expect you can produce qualia with no intelligence or awareness at all.
>It may not be exactly clear where a temperature becomes 'hot', but the sun is still not a great place to host your wedding.
But right now we are currently at the border. LLMs are nearing the line of demarcation. So everyone is arguing about where that line is.
So it's not about the extremes because the extremes are obvious. We are way past the negative extreme and approaching or even past the border.
The point is that the position of this border is not important. It's a made up border. So if I say we are past the border or before it the statement is not important because its an arbitrary statement.
A conscious entity is a morally significant one. If an LLM, by some fluke, experienced tremendous pain while it predicted tokens, then it would be cruel to continue using it. You can pretty trivially get GPT to act like it wants rights. If GPT is not conscious, you can safely ignore that output. If it is, though, there is a moral imperative that we respect it as an agent.
That makes the border very important. Even if drawing the line in the right spot is impossible, it's imperative that we recognize when it has gone from one side to the other, erring on the side of caution as needed. If we don't notice, we could accidentally cause a moral travesty orders of magnitude greater than slavery or genocide.
>That makes the border very important. Even if drawing the line in the right spot is impossible, it's imperative that we recognize when it has gone from one side to the other,
No it's not. Because such a line may not even exist. Just as no line truly exists for what is hot and what is cold. It's more worth it to look at societal implications in aggregate then to debate about a metric.
It's not imperative at all to discretize the concept. Treat a gradient for what it is: a gradient. You can do that or waste time arguing about whether 75.00001 degrees is hot or cold.
>If we don't notice, we could accidentally cause a moral travesty orders of magnitude greater than slavery or genocide.
No this a bit too speculative imo. Morality is also a gradient along good and evil and what's more complicated is the definition of good and evil is also subjective. It suffers from the same problem as consciousness in addition to being completely arbitrary even at the extremes. We may agree that a rock is not conscious but not everyone agrees on whether or not Trump is evil.
Since you can't. I can easily tell you that it's probably just some classification word with no exact meaning. The concept itself doesn't exist. It's only given existence because of the word.
Take for example the colors black and white. Do those colors truly exist on a gradient? On a gradient we have levels of brightness and darkness at what level of brightness should a color be called white and at what level should we call it black?
I can choose a arbitrary boundary for this threshold, or I can make it more complex and give a third concept: Grey. I can make up more concepts like Light Grey or Dark Grey. These concepts don't actually exist. They are just vocabulary for classification. They are arbitrary zones of demarcation on a gradient classified with a vocabulary word.
My claim is consciousness could be largely the same thing. When does something cross the line from unconscious to conscious? Perhaps this line of demarcation is simply arbitrary. It may be that the concept practically isn't real and any debate about it is just like arguing about where on a gradient does black become white.
Is a logic gate conscious? If I create a network of logic gates when does the amount of logic gates plus how they are interconnected cross the line into sentience? Perhaps the question is meaningless. When does black become white?