I believe consciousness is a gradual scale, but I'm inclined to set a certain hard cut somewhere to not make the term meaningless. None of these things would make the cut.

Without the cut, all of these would be conscious, but so would be my thermostat. A human embryo or a jellyfish is many, many orders of magnitude more conscious than GPT-4.

Nobody has ever adequately defined "consciousness," but GPT-4 is certainly the smartest of these 3 things.

@HarrisonNathan https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/consciousness/

I don't even know what consciousness is? The ability to perceive? Embryo's have all the DNA needed to do that in the future.

I don't think anyone considers AI conscious.

Not too familiar with Jellyfish, but they likely have limited abilities to perceive but no brain.

@ChinmayTheMathGuy to me it seems like consciousness is a made up term that is only meaningful in a religious/spiritual context.

It's like asking if souls exist.

I think it's unfalsifiable. If the test for consciousness is similar to a Turing test, then it would be GPT 4.

But knowing that GPT 4 is just a program, there's 0 chance it's actually conscious compared to living things which all share common ancestors.

@ChinmayTheMathGuy All terms are made up.

I would put an octopus at a higher likelihood than these three choices (though still small) but I agree overall

EDIT: early in the morning, was mixing up sentience and sapience. I agree with NBAP and their posted studies

@OwenHenahan You would regard the chance that octopi are sentient as small (less than 50%, presumably)? How do you square that with the preponderance of evidence suggesting that they are sentient:

"The evidence of sentience is very strong for octopods (order Octopoda)" (Birch et al., 2021, p. 79)

@NBAP I was thinking more in terms of approaching sapience, so yes, you are right. Sentience and consciousness in terms of "there is something it is like to be an octopus," qualia etc. I would say yes. Thank you for the study also, going to check it out in more depth later

Depends on species, yes for box and crown jellies, no on others

Picking the fourth option since "conscious" isn't a well defined or otherwise an useful concept in this context.

Some would say babies are not conscious before a year has passed

@RanaG some would say more like 25 years...

@Fion I'm still not conscious. I hope I get it for my birthday this year!

@Fion I actually agree on the 25

@RanaG Anything that can become unconscious is conscious the rest of the time. Whether it is sentient/sapient/self-aware/etc. are separate questions.