(August 24, 2015 at 5:25 pm)Rhythm Wrote: Late edit but I gave a couple of my favorites. Understanding consciousness would allow us to better manage a wide range of situations. Consciousness is a matter of awareness and response. Traffic management, law enforcement, education, mental health, cognitive impairment........or just more amusing toys, more comforting blankets......use your imagination (also, presumably, an issue touched upon by consciousness...lol).You changed defining to understanding. I've got no issue with understanding. I agree that increasing our knowledge of the conscious mind can and does provide practical benefits. .
Everything we can observe about consciousness strongly suggests that it -is- a "physical example", btw, and so too would be anything designed to interface with it. That something is doing something to something...and the effect presented is called, by us, "consciousness". That we might be able to mix a cocktail of chemical substances, for example, to modify or repair it (or enhance it), as we already do. Better pills, who wouldn't like some better pills, eh?
From the posts I assumed that this was a discussion of defining when an organism is thought to have consciousness. Or we get to a definition and then we are able to say that one conscious, that one not. I'm still not sure what defining gets you outside that point.
You used gravity. Here is the first definition that came up on google search: "the force that attracts a body toward the center of the earth, or toward any other physical body having mass". So what did that get me, not much. I can say what has gravity and what does not. But the study/understanding of the effects of gravity, Newtons Laws, that gave us much.
So traffic management, law enforcement, education, mental health, cognitive impairment, how does a definition impact these areas? Now, how does understanding impact these areas?
Being told you're delusional does not necessarily mean you're mental.
