Consciousness in AI: Distinguishing Reality from Simulation - Neuroscience News

While machines can replicate many of the functional properties of cognition—prediction, pattern-recognition, solving mathematical theorems—these processes are not accompanied by any first-person experience.

if you believe in computational functionalism, then a sufficiently accurate simulation of your connectome will be conscious (whether it will be your mind, let alone a sane rather than a mad mind, is a different matter). If you believe that consciousness is a structure of causal relationships, an essential aspect of reality tied to its physical subs

= A continuum of software-based human-level autonomy and empathy as determined by consensus of a small group of experts in matters of human consciousness.

there is an essential meaning of the word “consciousness,” one that contemporary neuroscientists, biologists, psychologists, or philosophers can recognize, even though they approach the phenomenon with varied methods and explain it in different ways. For all of them, more often than not, “consciousness” is a synonym of mental experience. And what i