Sam Harris On Defining Consciousness

[Whateverist]

Don't get me wrong, I think there's more going on in your head than their is in a dogs head, or a mollusks entire body.......but this division between being and doing seems to be groundless without elaboration.

Interesting though that you are the one who will always take the side of will as illusion. So surely consciousness is not something we're doing. At best -from a determinist's POV- consciousness is something that is happening to which we, rightly or wrongly, stake a claim as willers. Seems to me you should be on my side on this one.

Regardless, consciousness is hardly a naive intuition. It is the most invisible of attributes. If you wanted to bring it to someone's attention who did not have the concept, what would you point to? Consciousness is basically noticing things and realizing that we are noticing them. To me that is much too passive to describe as an act. So I call it the realization of a state of being.

..  "being" is an easily equivocated word, after all.  You're busily "being human", a rock is busily "being a rock", but you're doing some other sort of "being" that the rock isn't, and "doing" is in a similar predicament.....and I think we'd both agree to that.  Either way, suppose there was some difference, if there's no way to determine what that is, it's a difference that makes no difference, imo.

The difference seems to have something to do with perceiving oneself to be both an object in the world and also a subject with a particular point of view. It is doubtful that a rock perceives anything at all. The only one we know for sure that has consciousness is just our self. I naturally and usefully infer that those objects in the world that look like me are also subjects with their own point of view. If someone could unplug me from the world I know a la matrix, then I might realize I'd made some misattributions but it wouldn't be a mind blower on the same level as thinking that I my experience of myself was somehow counterfeit. The existence of illusions does not undermine ourselves as subjects, just the attributions we make regarding the world. Consciousness has more to do with our subject-hood than with what we are as objects.