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I can easily write a computer program that tells lies, that doesn't mean it's conscious.


Yes, but the key ingredient for human lying is a theory of mind, and a theory of mind is difficult to formulate without your own consciousness to generalize from. To get to even the motive for lying in the first place, you'd need awareness.

For a philosophical zombie, you'd need this behavior to exist independent of the zombie having a theory of mind and conscious awareness which they can use to reason about the state of another's awareness. That's a lot leaps of faith to take.


This "theory of mind" can be called "imagination" in a limited form. Allowing our conceptual self to act and predict what will happen is key to "consciousness".

We don't need to die by walking off a cliff, if we can have a conceptual version of ourself walk off, imagine the result of walking off the cliff and choose not to do it.

Yes this expands consciousness to animals, but I doubt it goes much farther than that. I think it fits.


You can write a computer program that returns incorrect information, I think that's the extent of it.


Can you prove to me that you're not an elaborate bot programmed to post on Hacker News?




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