Consciousness is a private affair. There is no way of directly knowing what it is like to be another. We can only infer. And we readily do infer that others have conscious experiences like we do, for essentially three kinds of reasons:
(1) they act like me
(2) they look like me
(3) they tell me
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Comparative psychology is full of debates about rich and lean explanations of animal action. While some human behaviors appear to be unique … nonhuman animals can of course act in many ways like a conscious human would (1): from rats with inflamed joints seeking out analgesics,1 to chimpanzees using a mirror to discover something about their appearance.2
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Large language models, by contrast, could “tell us” (reason 3). Though when I asked ChatGPT4, it still assured me that “AI systems … do not possess intrinsic feelings or awareness of their own state.” … AI does not “act like me” (1) or “look like me” (2), given that it is not a mobile, carbon-based life form.
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But of course it is worth keeping in mind that our attributing consciousness in no way changes the reality of whether another entity actually has consciousness …
