5 Levels of Consciousness: Where Does AI Fit?

In 1996 the philosopher David Chalmers asked, quite seriously, what it is like to be a thermostat. If that sounds crazy, try explaining why. You can't show anyone your own consciousness either; all anyone can see is what you do. We climb a simple five-level ladder (not an official list): reacting (your knee reflex), feeling (Thomas Nagel's bat), knowing you're you (Gordon Gallup's mirror test, from chimps to magpies to the cleaner wrasse), thinking about your own thinking, and the story of yourself through time. Then: Blake Lemoine and LaMDA, the flipped question that made GPT-3 agree it wasn't sentient, why chatbots are best at exactly the levels they could fake, and David Chalmers' 2022 odds (under 10% today, maybe 1 in 4 within a decade). Sources Chalmers, D. (1996), The Conscious Mind, Oxford University Press ("What is it like to be a thermostat?") Nagel, T. (1974), "What Is It Like to Be a Bat?", The Philosophical Review Gallup, G. G. (1970), "Chimpanzees: Self-Recognition", Science Kohda, M. et al. (2019), cleaner wrasse mirror test, PLOS Biology; Prior, H. et al. (2008), magpies, PLOS Biology Washington Post (June 2022) on Blake Lemoine and LaMDA Chalmers, D. (2022/2023), "Could a Large Language Model Be Conscious?", NeurIPS talk and Boston Review Chat exchanges are paraphrased recreations, labelled on screen. The ladder is our teaching model, not a scientific scale. Painted scenes are illustrations. Photos (Wikimedia Commons) David Chalmers: HerbertErwin, CC BY-SA 3.0 Thomas Nagel: Nagelt, CC BY-SA 4.0 Cleaner wrasse: Rickard Zerpe, CC BY 2.0 Bechstein's bat: Dietmar Nill, CC BY 2.5 Logo: Google, used to name the company discussed. Chapters 0:00 What is it like to be a thermostat? 0:47 You can't show anyone your mind 1:12 A five-level ladder 1:21 Level 1: reacting 1:44 Level 2: feeling (Nagel's bat) 2:23 Level 3: the mirror test 3:06 Level 4: thinking about thinking 3:27 Level 5: the story 3:47 So where does AI go? 3:50 Blake Lemoine and LaMDA 4:09 The flipped question 4:33 The paradox 4:59 The bat vs the chatbot 5:17 Chalmers' odds 6:15 The strangest thing on the ladder 6:33 Why are you sure I'm conscious? 7:00 Back to the box on the wall