You say that like its a good thing.
No, I'm not personally in favor of changing definitions of broken words. It leads to stupid arguments. But people do that.
If you look for consciousness from the outside, you'll find nothing, or you'll find behaviour. That's because consciousness is on the inside, is about subjectivity.
It would be preferable to find consciousness in the real world. Either reflected in behavior or in the physical structure of the brain. I'm under the impression that cousin_it believes you can have the latter without the former. I say you must have both. Are you saying you don't need either? That you could have two physically identical agents, one conscious, the other not?
It would be preferable to find consciousness in the real world.
I find myself to be conscious every day. I don't understand what you find "unreal" about direct experience.
(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!