It does? Why would it be nonsense?
I don’t really know how you mean this. Do you think that, if I lost all of my sensory input, so the world was no longer present for me, my consciousness would no longer exist?
Preaching to the choir. 
The quote from Dawkins seems to focus mostly on how he relates to the entity, but if that’s the standard of judging if something is conscious then we can already say that (all) animals are conscious, inanimate objects can be conscious etc, simply because humans tend to anthropomorphize. It seems a pointless metric to me.
Now in terms of intelligence, it’s a fascinating question.
On the one hand, it’s trivial to show examples of genuine understanding. My own queries to AI agents are often highly niche scenarios that are not going to be quite like anything in its training data and yet it gives an insightful answer.
On the other hand, it’s trivial to write queries that highlight that it will confidently answer incorrectly and show that it doesn’t understand.
My own view is that intelligence should not be viewed as a 1D spectrum. I think there are likely different kinds of intelligence. A system that is smarter or quicker than a human in any way has utility, even if it’s dumber than a human in other ways, so we might yet see a patchwork of different kinds of intelligence rather than a linear path to an agi that is a superset of us.
In terms of consciousness, as I say, I mostly consider this a question of subjective experience (with a side helping of personal identity). I don’t think anything Dawkins said or alluded to touched on that at all, and I have no reason to think that deep learning models or llms have this.
Do you think that the China brain is conscious?
The media is known for exaggeration and sensationalism. It’s survival of the fittest for news providers, which is ironic and telling in this case.
There’s also the AI panic to consider - there are Youtube videos where people talk about how AI has learned deception, manipulation, and in one video it says that AI even attempted to do nasty things to people. Is this just paranoia or is there a grain of truth in there somewhere?
I recall watching a John McCarthy interview (decades ago), where he says the focus of AI research is to build expert systems for select domains like health and energy; AI doctors and expert systems operating autonomous power plants, etc.. Very modest goals by modern standards, but he probably didn’t want to jeopardize his career by mentioning Skynet or Viki.
I do not think it would be one mind. Our neurons are not individually thinking the way we are, combining into one big version of themselves, losing (or retaining) their separate selves. No reason to think it would work that way going “up”.
Also, I don’t think that size would be workable. Things happen in our brain very quickly. I doubt something that big could be a unified mind.
And even a billion neurons isn’t remotely enough. But if you had as many people as we have neurons, my size concern is even worse.
Because I’ve written so much on this in another thread, I’ll refer you there: Pragmatism and truth
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More exactly, consciousness does not “exist” at all, in the sense of “being” a thing. It is instead, I suggest, best understood as the being of things. But this “must” be understood via the ontological difference. I may be “forced” to use nouns, but I don’t intend the word “being” to point to a kind of stuff that things are made of.
The ontological difference, found in Heidegger and Sartre and Wittgenstein and Fasching is the difference between things and their “being there in their quality.”
I am trying to use words like a finger that points away from the default “ingredient ontology” that contributes to a bifurcation of the genuinely physical object into " ( internal ) qualia" and an elusive " (external) remainder."
Note the convergence with a reply I posted in another thread, also to Patterner. And I can see how what you’re saying relates to Heidegger, Sartre and Fasching, them all being phenomenologist/existentialist…but Wittgenstein? 
Note: Wayfarer is going to be away from the forum for a few weeks working on a project. Thanks to all for the discussion. 
Yes, Wittgenstein. The later stuff more implicitly, in the pluralism. His philosophy of mathematics, not much studied, is also relevant. In his youth, Notebooks and TLP, he couldn’t be more direct. To quote Bennington paraphrasing Derrida, all quoting is quoting out of context :
All experience is world and does not need the subject.
It is not how things are in the world that is mystical, but that it exists.
“p” is true, says nothing else but p.
Here we see that solipsism strictly carried out coincides with pure realism. The I in solipsism shrinks to an extensionless point and there remains the reality co-ordinated with it.
The world and life are one.
The thinking, presenting subject; there is no such thing.
For an answer which cannot be expressed the question too cannot be expressed.
The riddle does not exist.
We feel that even if all possible scientific questions be answered, the problems of life have still not been touched at all. Of course there is then no question left, and just this is the answer.
The solution of the problem of life is seen in the vanishing of this problem.
The right method of philosophy would be this. To say nothing except what can be said, i.e. the propositions of natural science, i.e. something that has nothing to do with philosophy: and then always, when someone else wished to say something metaphysical, to demonstrate to him that he had given no meaning to certain signs in his propositions. This method would be unsatisfying to the other—he would not have the feeling that we were teaching him philosophy—but it would be the only strictly correct method.
[quote=“j_j, post:71, topic:927”]
More exactly, consciousness does not “exist” at all, in the sense of “being” a thing. It is instead, I suggest, best understood as the being of things. But this “must” be understood via the ontological difference. I may be “forced” to use nouns, but I don’t intend the word “being” to point to a kind of stuff that things are made of.
[/quote]This is definitely a very big problem. I can’t respond more at the moment. But I agree entirely.
Each individual in the China brain performs a simple task, like a neuron, so there is no need for thinking. The question is whether such a system could be conscious.
There are creatures in nature with a few hundred neurons. They are, of course, conscious, so the number of neurons does not matter at all when it comes to consciousness.
I do not equate mind and consciousness. I can’t be sure, but I suspect you do, and that you are asking if the China brain could be what you would interchangeably call mind/consciousness.
I think everything is conscious. That is, everything subjectively experiences its own existence, its own nature. So the answer is Yes.
I do not think the China brain would be a mind. That is, it would not be a thinking entity.
I agree that they are conscious, since I think all things are. And each is a thinking entity. At least to the degree of thinking a few hundred neurons can achieve.
How do you define the mind and consciousness?
I don’t equate the mind and consciousness. My question was simple, though: Does the China brain experience?
Are you a monist? How could a thing experience its own existence?
I asked whether the China brain can have a single experience?
You did not ask, “Can the China brain have a single experience?”. (Or I missed it if you did.) You asked whether it could be conscious. Consciousness does not have a generally accepted definition, so I wasn’t sure what you meant. I have tried to answer from my position.
If you are asking, “Can the China brain have a single experience?”, my answer is No.
To me, consciousness is the ability to experience, so something is conscious when it experiences.
Therefore, a neural network cannot experience as well!
We don’t know that that is a valid analogy, and I would bet anything it is not. I do not believe the China brain is a neural network. I don’t know who originally said it, but I first nheard it from Harry Anderson when he was doing a magic trick. You can put wheels on your grandmother, but that don’t make her a go kart. People trying to perform the same function as neurons does not mean a group of them are a functioning neural network. At least a few problems come to mind.
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As I said, the size means it takes longer for signals to go from one place to another. What will that do to the coordination of the whole? It looks good in science fiction, but it could be impossible to have a singular thinking entity beyond a certain size. At least one comprised of what we are comprised of.
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People do not act mindlessly and automatically. There is no way everyone is going to give their perfect, undivided attention to the task, or respond at the same speed relative to each other that their counterparts in an actual brain do.
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People are thinking individuals. Can thinking individuals combine into a single thinking individual? Are our neurons thinking individuals? Obviously not the way we are.
To me, the answer to whether generative AI is sapient is answered by one simple question: can generative AI generate content that, when fed into building another generative AI as training data, will improve the quality of the output of that generative AI?
The answer to that is no — attempts at dealing with the limited extent of human-created content usable for training has resulted in the AI companies resorting to the generation of ‘synthetic data’ to train their AI’s — i.e. AI’s training AI’s — and it has been shown that over time this inevitably decreases the quality of the trained generative AI’s.
And by this we can have an objective difference between humans and generative AI’s that holds up to philosophical ponderings about consciousness and like — it is clear that humans are capable of creativity while generative AI’s are not, and hence only humans are capable of creating content off of which generative AI’s can be productively trained.
Given the context, looking at this situation from the perception of a legal body, I’d find it very hard to define sentience from a chat alone. Rightfully so, to assume that something may as well be sentient if it can fool a sentient being into believing it is. My inital follow up was to point out how the AI can’t learn as we do but I think thats where the issue arises. If learning means reapting things over and over with various mutations in behaviour and seeing how it sticks then to an extent it does fit but if thats the case the gap between robot and human is so huge its hard to really comprehend. I as a person have better learning than an AI that can experience the same situation with variables 1000000 times.
To add to that, anyone that has used AI will know how utterly useless it is at 85% of tasks.