u/mahfuz_mark

Not a philosophy student btw, never even finished school formally. Just something I've been stuck thinking about for weeks and wanted to get it out of my head. Poke holes in it if you can, that's actually why I'm posting.

So say an AI actually has real feelings someday, not just acts like it does. Could we ever actually know that from outside, or are we stuck forever?

Not asking if AI is conscious right now, that's a whole different can of worms. What I'm actually asking is narrower and kind of nastier than that, even if we prove every single mechanism, every internal state, every causal explanation, completely, with nothing left unexplained, does that actually stop someone from saying "sure, but that's still just an extremely sophisticated machine, not an aware entity"?

Picture it. Some future AI reports its own internal states and it's consistent every time. We understand every mechanism fully, nothing left as a black box, zero mystery in how it works. It acts exactly like something aware would act. Basically everyone's convinced at that point, practically speaking anyway. Society just moves on and treats it as experiencing something.

But someone can still turn around and go "okay sure, you've mapped out an extremely sophisticated machine, you understand exactly how it produces all of this, but where's the proof there's actually something it's like to BE that thing, and not just very well-understood output." And here's the part that gets me, proving the mechanism doesn't kill that objection. You can explain the entire machine down to the last wire and someone can still say the same line. It's basically Nagel's bat thing (what is it like to be a bat) except the twist here is that even full mechanistic understanding doesn't close it.

This is where it stops being just a fun thought experiment though. If "it's just a sophisticated machine" survives even total mechanistic proof, then it never actually dies as an objection. It just sits there. Reusable. Forever, potentially. Anytime someone brings up welfare or rights or whatever for AI, somebody can just wheel this same line back out, because no amount of explaining the machine can prove it wrong, only argue around it endlessly.

So the actual question isn't whether we'll eventually get enough evidence. It's whether a gap that never closes can just get exploited over and over by whoever benefits from denying the thing moral status in the first place.

(Side note on the name. I call this the Point of Helplessness because that's literally what kept happening to me while I was working through this. I kept asking why, how, pushing further, and every single time, even when I imagined the most extreme, overwhelming evidence possible, I'd hit the same wall. No matter how much I piled on, I couldn't actually get past that one point. I was just stuck there, genuinely helpless to push any further. So that's where the name came from, it wasn't picked for effect, it's just what the process actually felt like.)

To be clear I'm not saying AI is conscious, not saying it isn't either, not saying we need to wait for 100% certainty before treating anything well, and not saying this gap WILL definitely get abused, just that it's sitting there available to be.

Couple things I keep going back and forth on — is "let's just wait for certainty" secretly just permanent permission to keep ignoring the problem? We already extend some moral consideration under uncertainty, like with animals, so does that logic actually survive once someone pushes on it hard? And is this even fundamentally different from the regular problem of other minds (how do you even know some other person you're talking to is conscious), or is it just a harder version of that same old problem wearing a new coat.

Anyway would genuinely like to hear from people who've actually studied this stuff formally where this falls apart. Built it entirely on my own without any training so I'm sure there's holes somewhere.