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hyporational comments on Open thread, Oct. 27 - Nov. 2, 2014 - Less Wrong
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I haven't gotten that impression. The p-zombie problem those other guys talk about is a bit different since human beings aren't made with a purpose in mind and you'd have to explain why evolution would lead to brains that only mimic conscious behavior. However if human beings make robots for some purpose it seems reasonable to program them to behave in a way that mimics behavior that would be caused by consciousness in humans. This is especially likely since we have hugely popular memes like the Turing test floating about.
I tend to believe that much simpler processes than we traditionally attribute consciousness to could be conscious in some rudimentary way. There might even be several conscious processes in my brain working in parallel and overlapping. If this is the case looking for human-like traits in machines becomes a moot point.
I often wonder if my subconsciousness is actually conscious, it's just a different consciousnesses than me.
I actually arrived at this supposedly old idea on my own when I was reading about the incredibly complex enteric nervous system in med school. For some reason it struck me that the brain of my gastrointestinal system might be conscious. But then thinking about it further it didn't seem very consistent that only certain bigger neural networks that are confined by arbitrary anatomical boundaries would be conscious, so I proceeded a bit further from there.