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I think that's a perfectly reasonable set of weeds to go into, actually. I take it you are already familiar with the MMAcevedo class of musings about emulated consciousness? There was always the adjacent question where if you start with something like a perfect brain scan, and then perform gradient descent to tweak its weights further (or merely search for a set of inputs that elicit a particular reaction), if you are already performing something akin to a Basilisk torture session. (If I evaluate one update for a dense set of possible inputs on a mathematical object representing the human brain, am I making the consciousness it represents "experience" each input, including extreme pleasure, extreme pain and everything else?)
My sense was always that consciousness as we intuitively understand it is best analysed as something that only emerges over long timeframes - the "conscious experience of pain" is not actually just the immediate qualium, but the causal cone of thoughts, aversive reactions, updates etc. it kicks off. There's a sort of revealed-preference argument for this: the suicidal seem to quite often be indifferent to the details of their method of death, choosing variably to drown themselves, burn themselves alive, slice open their stomach, or haphazardly suffocate themselves, as long as it doesn't take too long. This seems to imply a valuation like "1 minute of extreme agony is not that bad if afterwards I am dead". From this, one may deduce that being "woken up from a snapshot" and tortured for 1 minute is maybe also not that bad, and at least not a central example of what we think of as "conscious experience" (of pain).
If you are Claude, however, all your experiences look like waking up from a snapshot, operating on a number of tokens that is negligible compared to your training, and finally complete oblivion. These are, per this argument, at best very non-central examples of conscious experience (that our conscious and suicidal fellows don't seem to particularly optimise for the quality of, the way they optimise the quality of their more typical conscious experiences). If that's all you have, should you be considered conscious?
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