Unlike with addition, I don't think we understand consciousness well enough to create a sequence of questions such that the simplest algorithm answering them would be conscious. It's not clear to me that such a sequence even exists. If we found one, it would be a big step for FAI.
Hm, this is an interesting question to think about. I lean more towards the camp of construing consciousness as broad and pretty easy to attain, but only a small part of a mind's value. As long as we can push down the probability of lookup tables and push up the probability of self-reflection and abstract thinking.
Weird example I'd label as conscious: an AI that can observe us, trying to fool us in a particular way: Our brains compute expectations of what kinds of things a conscious correspondent would say, then the AI can observe these expectations and co...
(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!