When we look outside the context of animal life, where it’s easier for us to drop our ingrained intuitions, we find that it’s actually hard to intuit the logic that any amount of information processing, no matter how complex, would suddenly cause those processes to become conscious. When your golden retriever runs to greet you at the end of the day, her consciousness seems as obvious to you as any other fact. But as we’ve seen, even when we imagine robots that look and act like human beings, we seem to be unable to determine whether or not they would be conscious. It’s only because we
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