Sure. By the same token, if you take me, remove my ability to communicate, and encase me in an opaque cylinder, nobody will recognize me as a being with subjective experience. Or, for that matter, as a being with the ability to construct English sentences.
We are bounded intellects reasoning under uncertainty in a noisy environment. We will get stuff wrong. Sometimes it will be important stuff.
it's reasonable for me to think that as my statements about qualia seem to follow causally from experiencing said qualia, that other people don't have a totally separate framework for their statements about qualia.
I agree. And, as I said initially, I apply the same reasoning not only to the statements I make in English, but to all manner of behaviors that "seem to rise from my qualia," as you put it... all of it is evidence in favor of other organisms also having subjective experience, even organisms that don't speak English.
I wouldn't be that confident though,
How confident are you that I possess subjective experience?
Would that confidence rise significantly if we met in person and you verified that I have a typical human body?
and it gets harder with artificial consciousness.
Agreed.
Consciousness does seem different in that we can have a better and better understanding of all the various functional elements but that we're 1) left with a sort of argument from analogy for others having qualia 2) even if we can resolve(1), I can't see how we can start to know whether my green is your red etc. etc.
I can't think of many comparable cases: certainly I don't think containership is comparable. You and I could end up looking at the AI in the moment before it destroys/idealises/both the world and say 'gosh, I wonder if it's conscious'. This is ...
Another month has passed and here is a new rationality quotes thread. The usual rules are: