"Concious" is defined in the standard way: There is something it is like to be a baby. They have qualia, they have subjective experiences. Whatever it is that adult human philosophers believe themselves to have.
This is about the average human baby, 1 week after birth. The existance of some outlier babies is not relevant.
This market resolves once neuroscience is solved, and it seems we're going to have as good an answer as we're ever going to get.
1,000
3.00Babies can become unconscious, so they are obviously conscious the rest of the time. Whether they are sentient/sapient/self-aware/etc. are different questions.
I'd bet on a version of this market marked as "non-epistemic" / "unlikely to ever resolve". As it stands, I'd expect my correct opinion to be outvoted by others in what amounts to an opinion poll, and I'd be okay with spending M$1000 on that, but not so much having it be part of my profit/loss record.
@EliezerYudkowsky This will resolve in the universes where aligned SAI is built, and there's an entity that understands consciousness in a technical ways.
There's a standard way to define consciousness? My impression was that different adult philosophers defined it in different ways.
But there's a standard way to measure consciousness in medical patients - the Glasgow Coma Scale. With a pediatric version for babies under 36 months. I'm not sure how a 1 week old baby would typically do on that scale.
I have never been in close proximity to a 1 week old under circumstances where experimenting on it to see how much it understood of the world would have been socially acceptable, so I'm not in a position to bet based on firsthand knowledge, but a quick Google of fetal brain development suggests I should bet yes based on what is currently known. They respond to noises, can be shown to be familiar with their mother's voice at birth, if I recall correctly they have culture-specific food preferences shaped by what the mother ate during development, meaning they are likely learning in the womb. They recognize faces at birth, meaning they already have some basics of what sensory data to give higher salience to, I would bet they respond to pain and soft touch. I guess the only question is, do the signals from the neurons that will in older humans be linked to feeling pain, feel like pain to a 1 week old when its brain gets signals from those neurons? This could be a function of integrated sensory processing across many areas of the brain, so it seems relevant that fetal and newborn brainwaves match older-person brainwaves in terms of having things like REM sleep, which suggests they dream. Dreaming seems pretty pure "experiencing the internal sensation philosophers would define as consciousness" to me.
Does the same caveat apply here?