https://www.wired.com/story/book-excerpt-a-world-appears-michael-pollan/ Was sent this with the comment, "check the comment sections, one of them is from Claude." I went balistic. Replied with something like, "That's not what happened at all! What you see is a comment presumably written by a Claude instance at the request of some person posted by that person. It's not "from" Claude. Claude is not a person who posts comments on wired articles. Is this not obvious!?! These are categorically different things that only happen to look similar! I feel like I'm possessed, infected. I need to get checked. An exorcism may be required." Coincidentally I have 90% of letter paralleling Pollan's with significantly different conclusions written. Will share soon.

No comment on that article because apparently I have used up my free article quota on Wired. But... just the title... What's the point of discussing if "AI will ever be conscious", given that (1) our collective understanding of consciousness remains very vague and (2) there is no consensus about which technologies, present and future, are part of the equally vague label "AI"? People are bound to talk past each other.

True. That's part of the point of writing an article rather than a tweet @Konrad Hinsen. Pollen can describe what consciousness means to him. He is mostly critiquing this https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1364661325002864.

There's a lot to critique in that paper! But what I'd critique most of all is the (clearly admitted) vagueness of the whole concept of AI consciousness.

Thanks @Konrad Hinsen. I'll share my work soon. Mostly needs some diagrams and typing-setting now. But I go about as deep into the topic as anyone should. Whether I satisfyingly prove its bottomless and a dead end, will be for readers to decide.

Is anyone talking about how "consciousness", even if it can be defined, is not necessarily the same as having moral rights or ability to suffer? Not in the part of the wired article I can read, at least...

Yes, talking about it. And no, the article is incomplete. In my letter, I quote Scott Alexander commenting on the same AI consciousness research. https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/the-new-ai-consciousness-paper

The SA article and Pollan quote are both interesting, but neither really address my question at all. Certainly not directly.

Fair. Let's see. I have about 3 million words of interesting AI stuff from the last three years indexed on my laptop here. Here are three relevant links: https://mustafa-suleyman.ai/seemingly-conscious-ai-is-coming, , https://thoughtforms.life/qa-from-the-internet-and-recent-presentations-3/. And if you want quotes, it's only a little effort on my part to produce them.