What is consciousness, is an old subject, with old arguments around old miss-understandings. People here are trying to use new analogies from computer science (a clock work universe), or with miss-understandings around quantum mechanics (somehow randomness give me agency).
Until General AI needs to work for food and reproduction, everyone will still say its just mimicking humans.
Best summarized by Schopenhauer.
"A man can do as he wills, but not will as he wills."
So if we find where the GAI comes up with the original ‘will’, we’ll just write it off as computation.
Go watch some Robert Sapolsky lectures. We are just a monkey society, reacting to stimuli based on hormones and what we just ate. If you drill down far enough, sure some electrons twitched one way or the other, and yeah, if you steal something, or do something the group doesn’t like, then all the other monkeys will want to beat you up and call it justice, and dream up some logic to justify it and call it morality. And eventually the same will happen between GAI agents. Because it’s just turtles all the way down.
Until General AI needs to work for food and reproduction, everyone will still say its just mimicking humans. Best summarized by Schopenhauer. "A man can do as he wills, but not will as he wills." So if we find where the GAI comes up with the original ‘will’, we’ll just write it off as computation. Go watch some Robert Sapolsky lectures. We are just a monkey society, reacting to stimuli based on hormones and what we just ate. If you drill down far enough, sure some electrons twitched one way or the other, and yeah, if you steal something, or do something the group doesn’t like, then all the other monkeys will want to beat you up and call it justice, and dream up some logic to justify it and call it morality. And eventually the same will happen between GAI agents. Because it’s just turtles all the way down.