Sam Harris On Defining Consciousness

[The Grand Nudger]

I would, but only because we can see computers presenting the effects we might call consciousness in a critter, perhaps using a different mechanism to achieve it (though perhaps not).  When I get into that though, I sometimes think that people might wonder whether or not I think there's a computer somewhere reciting hamlet to itself in a ponderous fashion....I don't think that at all.  I think that whatever's going on inside the computer is very similar to whats going on inside a sunflower, and less similar - but still within proximity- to whats going on in in a "simple" multicellular organism, and then less similar still...but not entirely divorced...from what we have going on in our own heads. It's process and principle and mechanism leveraged that I speculate upon, not any internal experience....though I can't entirely rule that out, at least not in any way that doesn't -also- rule out whatever internal experience you're having, which I accept wholeheartedly as both evident and very, very visible.

From my pov, explaining why I don't accept that a rock is conscious is fairly easy to explain...and has nothing to do with their being inorganic, but assumptions are necessarily made. I keep returning to this one, but a wing of steel and a wing made of skin and bone, to me, are both flying - organic, inorganic, it hardly matters. A rose by any other name, and all that..lol.