Jonathan Birch

Which is horrifying.

Then you have philosophers like Jonathan Birch at the London School of Economics who tries to apply an anatomical threshold.

He suggests that true ethical trouble only begins if the organoids grow a brainstem.

He treats the brainstem as the essential power cable for consciousness.

However, the internal mechanisms and developmental processes underlying these behaviors might differ in AI systems.

As Kristen Andrews and Jonathan Birch observe in their discussion of the gaming problem, a subset of the mismatch problem, this issue is especially salient when AI systems are trained to mimic our behaviors or when they learn to game our behavioral evaluations.

Second, internal evidence faces the specificity problem.

Our leading theories of consciousness were developed by studying brains, so they often describe relevant internal mechanisms in biological terms.

The minimal definition that we're after should be just this notion of experience.

There was a good example I was reading yesterday in a paper by Jonathan Birch, a philosopher at LSE, and he said, uh, a child throws a ball across a field and sort of runs after it.

Now, the ball just flies through the air.

There is nothing it is like for the ball to fly through the air.