Sam Harris On Defining Consciousness

[The Grand Nudger]

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).

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?

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. .

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?

We already went over this, without a definition no logical operation can be performed.  No operation, no knowledge.  No knowledge, no understanding. Simply by learning how to define consciousness we will have to investigate, we will have to learn more. Even the definition brings knowledge. Even that definition of gravity is filled with knowledge. It tells you what the force does, and a rudimentary explanation of the how. Understanding -only that- you can make gravity do work (just as we've made our consciousness do work, and done work -to- our consciousness with our own rudimentary understanding of it).

-At the very least, a definition would grant the knowledge of just wtf we're all talking about when we use the term in conversation - even if the definition is, itself, non-factual, we'll at least understand what the other is trying to say.......which might be important, lol.

@Rhonda- Science is more the explaining arm, engineering is the manipulating arm. I'd say what science does is offer an explanation. What use that explanation is, what manipulation can be achieved, is generally left to other pursuits - and science moves on to the next thing that needs an explanation (or to re-assessing it's current explanations).