(August 24, 2015 at 2:52 pm)Rhondazvous Wrote: Am currently reading Sam Harris book “Spirituality Without God.” Harris talks about the difficulty of defining consciousness. I know there are different degrees of consciousness, but I think he’s talking about basic consciousness as a province of sentient beings. It is, I think, the difference between a “being” and a mere organism or object.
As Harris says, we know what consciousness isbut simply cannot define it the same way we define a concept like fluidity (the movement of like molecules.) I think the main problem is the definitions we use in our efforts to define consciousness are not exclusive enough in a world of high technology. What could we say? Is consciousness memory? Does having awareness make one conscious? Maybe it should be qualified as self-awareness. . but can it be said that a computer program that is able to detext foreign input and distinguish it from native code is self-aware? As the guardians of human dignity, we want to define consciousness in a way that excludes Windows, and none of the above indicators does that. What’s more, as Harris points out, they can only be verified subjectively. I know that I am conscious because I know that I am conscious. But how can we prove, using the scientific method, that others have consciousness?
I look at consciousness, like most other constructs, as a spectrum. Modern computers are conscious, in a sense, but to such a low extent compared to humans that it'd be meaningless to consider them as such.
