The idea of 'I', myself,separate from all else. My decisions affect my fate.

You like others conflate "how","what" and "why". Whether or not it is biomechanics,electrochemicals or a projected hologram of quanta is "how", so is whether or not stimuli or measurement of stimuli form our reality perception.

A person has fainted, that person then wakes back up,you say:"the person lost consciousness but is now conscious". He was no longer in a self aware state where he would have made decisons to self-preserve and he is now back in that state. Regardless of intelligence or processing capacity, a self aware program that self preserves without explicit instructions for either functions is conscious.

I'm not conflating anything. I'm trying to understand the meaning behind phrases like "reality perception" - which convey little meaning without a definition. “What” “Why” & “How” are used to grasp at meanings.

See, words are for conveying meaning. When they have too broad of a definition, little information is conveyed (which is why phatic expressions and small talk suck). To better convey meaning, we form more stringent definitions and create new words. Notice however, the formation of new words and stricter definitions is a never ending pursuit, otherwise if we could fully explain things we would end doing so.

For example, notice we started somewhere with a definition for life, and then years go by and it ends up being too ill-suited for discriminating life from non-life. So we add additional words to describe what makes life... life. Eventually we'll either have a well defined line between what makes something living and non-living, or we perpetually keep on tacking on existing words or new words to describe it. The same goes for intelligence.

I can only see two scenario’s:

Scenario A: We end up perpetually trying to define intelligence, and thus we’ll always struggle to differentiate intelligence.

Scenario B: we come to full stop and are able to fully explain everything (at least regarding intelligence). At which point intelligence will be fully differentiable.

Are we at scenario B yet? Then it should be easy to come up with a satisfactory test for AI, let alone know if it’s even a possibility. Yet here we are today still unsatisfied by the state of computer intelligence… This is what I mean in my OP by: “These terms require aggrandizing to the point of impossibility or they lose all apparent meaning.”

Anyhow, I like your points on self-aware introspection and self-preserving strategy formation. But I'm not yet convinced that it has strict enough definitions to differentiate if something is truly AI. I mean is a computer that tries to prevent itself from going into sleep mode, and is aware when attempts are being made to put it into sleep mode - fit your definition? It kind of does... yet, I think we'd agree that wouldn't be AI.

If that is a programmed function then it does not fit my definition. If it was not made to be aware,it became aware as a result of learning information and adjusting its programming and it realized the difference between sleep mode and a system wipe(death) and adjusts its programming to prevent a death scenario then it is conscious.

As for the rest, I don't think I am part of "We" I have pretty strict,well understood and time tested definitions for life and intelligence,separate from consciousness.

There's no discernible difference between p-zombies and 'real' conscious beings. There's a good chance that we're all p-zombies and a distinction between zombie and real doesn't exist.

> If you pull back enough layers on how or why humans think or do the things they do - we arrive at things we can't explain.

Sounds a lot like a magical argument. There's no evidence that anything about the way human minds work is fundamentally unexplainable.

Agreed. What I'm implying here is if we come circle to fully explaining how the brain works, then in theory we could predict how someone will function if given all input conditions (whether this is practical is another matter). If this is true, then wouldn't we just be biomechanical robots operating on stimuli? Would we be any more intelligent than say a rock, that similarly just reacts to physical stimuli? Or are we just a more complex rock?

Yes, that's right. Which is one of the big problems with this line of argument for many people -- how do you reconcile "biomechanical robot" with the concepts of "free will" and "moral decision-making"?

I'm personally agnostic on the issue (I don't believe science is able to answer this question yet -- or possibly ever.)

I do think it's interesting that you say "just a biomechanical robot." The "just" implies that being a robot -- a fancy rock -- in some way isn't enough. But in my mind, there's absolutely no (objective) reason to think of a human as any better or more important than a robot, or a rock.

I'm just trying to challenge people's assumptions of what makes something intelligent. To me, it's not precisely clear as to what makes something intelligent, and is why I think we've had trouble coming up with a satisfactory test for determining when a computer is intelligent.

(P.S. Sorry for putting words in your mouth -- I don't want to imply you said anything you didn't. My bad there.)

> are we just a more complex rock?

of course we are. moreover, it's pretty straightforward to trace our evolution back to rocks or rock-like formations.

(see the "Origin of biological metabolism" section - lots of good new research coming out recently, including simulations of the very early processes predating life as such)

You might counter that your brain is tricking you into thinking you have those experiences, when you don’t. It’s an illusion.

Bit ask yourself this. What would it even mean for the experience of pain or color to be an illusion? An illusion is itself a conscious experience!

Can you have evidence that something is "fundamentally unexplainable"? Other than a lack of explanation?

If your statement has consequences, then there must be an imaginable counterfactual where it does not hold. I'm struggling to think of that.

I think you're getting it wrong. There's no externally discernible difference between a normal person and a p-zombie, because the difference is in how they experience. I know I'm conscious, because I subjectively experience it, but I can't be sure about anyone else because they could be a p-zombie that has everything except that subjective experience.

No, we arrive at things that are uncomfortable to explain.

I think one of the biggest impacts of AI is that it will force us to confront this.

I think it's already being confronted but behind corporate greed instead of public need.

Computers react to electrical inputs, and on some level can be considered reacting to a stimuli.

Is a computer therefore conscious?

Consciousness and computation are entirely up to what we define these words to mean. At some point we have to settle on a satisfactory definition of consciousness that fully differentiates it from computation, or they’re left with at least some overlapping (analogous) meaning.

If we dismiss consciousness as currently unknowable us, and thus undefinable (as your statement about dimensions alludes to), then how can we say assume with certainty, that we haven’t already achieved conscious AI?

So the human brain can enjoy things because..... magic?