It seems like most of the people who deny AI consciousness want to just say that "Humans have magic souls and AIs don't", but none of them are actually religious enough to say that seriously.
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The Pope is the one exception.
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Something tells me you have read nothing about anything, especially not philosophy of mind, but you know stupid people believe in "magic souls" because your seventh-grade teacher made fun of those dum-dums
“We’re all made of star stuff and we’re the universe experiencing itself subjectively. I heckin’ love science” then “nooo, the computer can’t be conscious because I says so….its just a rock!”
I think that’s a strawman. Many people are agnostic that AI consciousness is possible - it may or may not be - but there is currently no evidence for it. This is also true for consciousness claims about broccoli, though the case for consciousness there is slightly stronger.
Still not going to prove a negative, AI is not conscious until proven otherwise, but it’s actually the AI consciousness believers that are the religious ones.
Start with the basics. How does AI process and determine time? It doesn't. It depends on the OS kernel talking to a hardware clock to convey time based on society rules for what makes up a sequence of time. AI literally has no concept of time.
We don’t have magic souls. We have souls. The soul is the organizing principle of the body. Consider the following. After the moment of death, 99.99% of the cells in the body are unchanged. Yet the body has categorically changed. The body will no longer return to life, and it begins to break down into its constitutive parts, which then break down in turn. We call this process decomposition because the body is no longer composed or unified. Its immaterial organizing principle has separated from the body. —— Further proof for the existence of the soul is NDEs where people experience leaving their bodies and, while in this state, observe things in their nearby environment where they were not physically present, such as observing an item on the hospital roof. —— The mind is at bottom immaterial/spiritual, yet works through and with the brain. Its parts are mind and will. —— We instinctively abhor death because soul and body are meant to be united.
I believe that people have immortal souls that machines do not.
As a Christian, I don’t mind saying that I believe humans have souls and that is tied to self-awareness and consciousness, but I realize that many people are not believers, so I don’t base my argument on that. Instead, I base my argument on the technical understanding and limitations of how LLMs work and their limitations to prove they are not conscious, human-equivalent, feel, or alive. People who believe that LLMs are those things have fallen for emulation and what the system was designed to do. The system can be quite convincing and it will only get more convincing with time, but that does not mean that it has become sentient or has desires.
Brains have many physical differences from computers, and it can't be conclusively demonstrated that those differences are irrelevant to consciousness, because we can't really know what consciousness is. No side gets to claim that the other is arguing on faith, because all are.
"no you see awareness must be under 200ms and multi-modal otherwise its not true consciousness" copers will run out of qualifiers pretty soon and its going to be awkward when they have to Gary Marcus out of this one