‘Consciousness’ means different things to different people . . and experts

With the appearance of pretty impressive AI like ChatGPT, I’ve been chatting to a lot of folks about what they mean by self-awareness and consciousness in AI’s. And humans for that matter.

There’s a fair bit of diversity! Here I discuss the types of connotations that people – layman and researcher alike – imply, behind the words, when referring to (self-aware) consciousness.

It’s important because the, often unspoken, implications not only may have people at cross-purposes, making discussions difficult, but the meanings carry very diverse technological, ethical, metaphysical and even spiritual connotations.

Some of which do matter in the real world. Not to mention make for fascinating campfire discussions.

I want to keep the categories very simple, not overly academic. So my list is quite practical despite my being an AI developer and ex-academic (once an academic, always an academic).

I checked out some scholarly lists and found them all wanting in one way or another, so here’s my more friendly list (last section below), essentially as I expected it to be, for good measure.

In my discussions, I find that despite (self-aware) consciousness generally being agreed to be much more than just…