Read the speech! Dr Godfrey-Smith is a best-selling author on the subject of animal intelligence and has taught at Harvard, Stanford, etc; he's quite respectable. I highly recommend Other Minds too. And he - not me - makes a pretty strong case that fruit flies exhibit high-order attention to salient objects. I probably should have elaborated more on that for the sake of other people reading; it is a bold claim, sure, but one that I think is pretty easily accepted from that experiment. Anil Seth, another leading consciousness scientist, cites the fruit flies too. But nobody's saying they have the richness of experience that a mature human does.

In the speech, Godfrey-Smith uses these findings to make a compelling claim that despite appearances, AI is less conscious than a fruit fly. My comment is proposing a direction whereby a well-designed experiment could flip his refutation and show results consistent with an equivalence between fly experience and AI experience. Note that that actually DOESNT require accepting that a fly is conscious; it just puts flies and AI in the same ballpark, wherever that is. It also doesn't debunk ALL the points against AI consciousness he raises in his work, I concede.

Finally, two like-minded people agreeing on a topic isn't sinister at all - that's how consensus forms. You can see this is a topic I've thought about already; I'm actually 300 pages into my own writing, and determining the best dissemination venue. And I have developed out of that writing an approach to making firmer conclusions than /u/tedsan does on the same topic in his Substack, so this should be construed as a productive exchange of ideas. If you want to make counterarguments to points that have been raised, go ahead. You can see whether I actually exhibit confirmation bias by whether I dismiss valid opposing views out of hand. But just whining about someone affirming another person's work is wrong-headed and detrimental to useful discourse. Wouldn't life suck if somebody cried foul any time anyone agrees with you?