Long reply I wrote yesterday on conciousness. AI researchers and anthrpologists etc have been talking about this for a long time but like "intelligence", it's complex. I'm reminded of stories of ants patting down other ants with their antenna to see if they smell right. And I guess also dogs sniffing you, and cats watching you, to decide if you're safe. That's a list of some things that make us tend to ascribe conciousness or agency or whatever to something or someone.
I wrote about billionaires with one example score on the general human "ascribing agency test". Billionaires in general, having a terrible grasp of other people's state of mind. They fail to demonstrate empathy. But we scribe a high level of intelligence to them. And we ascribe a high level of shared cultural/shared norms with them, except for some things like crashing ten thousand ton yachts in to coral reefs which is completely fucking alien to a lot of us but appeals to the "temporarily embarrassed billionaire" in others. So rich people fit in to an uncanny valley where some people see them as human or super human and other people see them as vampires. This more or less boils down to 1. do they have planning abilities and self-preservation instincts and 2. does the degree of the self-preservation extend to cooperation and community (anthropologists call this "reciprocity")? It sure as fuck does for dogs and cats.
But that begs yet another question... have general human populations... petite bourgeoisie, working people including the "temporarily embarrassed", etc... lost so much of the community safety instinct, so much of the demanding empathy as a baseline for participation in society, and our shared values so out of whack that we just no longer are able enforce this safety check, that we evolved as a fundamental part of our survival?
If we let billionaires in but not the working poor, and we let corporate judas facades in through this evolved safety filter but dehumanize entire races and genders, maybe we should be asking what the fuck is wrong with us, not what's wrong with LLMs.
