Seeing red isn't the same as claiming to see red
A record player looping the words "I see red" is very different from how humans see, both internally and behaviorally. A robot which takes a picture, finds the most common pixel color, and if that's red, plays the same "I see red" sound, is still in some ways different, but a lot less so. And if someone wanted to call this second robot conscious, as far as color is concerned, there would be no problem with that.
You may feel that pain is special, and that if we recognize a robot which says "ouch" when pushed, to feel pain, that would be in some sense bad. But it wouldn't. We already recognize that different agents can have equally valid experiences of pain, that aren't equally important to us (e.g. torturing rats vs humans. or foreigners vs family). This is not a new problem, and suggesting that some agents have a magical invisible property that makes their experiences important, is not a good solution.
You may feel that pain is special, and that if we recognize a robot which says "ouch" when pushed, to feel pain, that would be in some sense bad. But it wouldn't. We already recognize that different agents can have equally valid experiences of pain, that aren't equally important to us (e.g. torturing rats vs humans. or foreigners vs family).
I don't see how it follows from the fact that foreigners and animals feel pain that it is reasonable to recognize that a robot that is programmed to say "ouch" when pushed feels pain. Can you clar...
(This post grew out of an old conversation with Wei Dai.)
Imagine a person sitting in a room, communicating with the outside world through a terminal. Further imagine that the person knows some secret fact (e.g. that the Moon landings were a hoax), but is absolutely committed to never revealing their knowledge of it in any way.
Can you, by observing the input-output behavior of the system, distinguish it from a person who doesn't know the secret, or knows some other secret instead?
Clearly the only reasonable answer is "no, not in general".
Now imagine a person in the same situation, claiming to possess some mental skill that's hard for you to verify (e.g. visualizing four-dimensional objects in their mind's eye). Can you, by observing the input-output behavior, distinguish it from someone who is lying about having the skill, but has a good grasp of four-dimensional math otherwise?
Again, clearly, the only reasonable answer is "not in general".
Now imagine a sealed box that behaves exactly like a human, dutifully saying things like "I'm conscious", "I experience red" and so on. Moreover, you know from trustworthy sources that the box was built by scanning a human brain, and then optimizing the resulting program to use less CPU and memory (preserving the same input-output behavior). Would you be willing to trust that the box is in fact conscious, and has the same internal experiences as the human brain it was created from?
A philosopher believing in computationalism would emphatically say yes. But considering the examples above, I would say I'm not sure! Not at all!