>but that doesn't mean that the machine is actually conscious in the same way a human body empirically
Does it matter? Is a dog/cow/bird/lizard conscious in the same way a human is? We're built from the same basic parts, and yet humans seem to have a higher state of consciousness than other animals around us.
For example the definition of the word conscious is
>aware of and responding to one's surroundings; awake.
I'll give that we likely mean this in a general sense, but I'd say we're pretty close to this with machines. They can observe the real world with sensors of different types, and then either directly compute, or use neural nets to make generalized decisions on what is occurring around them, then proceed to act on those observations.
Does it matter? Is a dog/cow/bird/lizard conscious in the same way a human is? We're built from the same basic parts, and yet humans seem to have a higher state of consciousness than other animals around us.
For example the definition of the word conscious is
>aware of and responding to one's surroundings; awake.
I'll give that we likely mean this in a general sense, but I'd say we're pretty close to this with machines. They can observe the real world with sensors of different types, and then either directly compute, or use neural nets to make generalized decisions on what is occurring around them, then proceed to act on those observations.