> And the claim other humans don’t have subjective experience is such non-starter.
There is no empirical test for the subjective experience of consciousness. You can't even prove to anybody else that you have it. We assume other people experience as we ourselves do as a basic decency we extend to other humans. This is a good thing, but it's essentially faith not science.
As for machines not having it, I'm fine with that assumption, but until there can be some sort of empirical test for it, it's not science. Thankfully, it's also not relevant to any engineering matter. Whether the machines have a subjective experience in any way comparable to our own doesn't touch any question about what demonstrable capabilities or limitations they have. We don't need to know if the computer has a ""soul"" to know if the computer can be a solution to any given engineering problem. Whether machines can have subjective experience shouldn't be considered an important question to engineers; let theologians waste their time fruitlessly debating that.
There is no empirical test for the subjective experience of consciousness. You can't even prove to anybody else that you have it. We assume other people experience as we ourselves do as a basic decency we extend to other humans. This is a good thing, but it's essentially faith not science.
As for machines not having it, I'm fine with that assumption, but until there can be some sort of empirical test for it, it's not science. Thankfully, it's also not relevant to any engineering matter. Whether the machines have a subjective experience in any way comparable to our own doesn't touch any question about what demonstrable capabilities or limitations they have. We don't need to know if the computer has a ""soul"" to know if the computer can be a solution to any given engineering problem. Whether machines can have subjective experience shouldn't be considered an important question to engineers; let theologians waste their time fruitlessly debating that.