Sam Harris On Defining Consciousness

[bennyboy]

No, my version is "is aware of it's environment".  We judge this by response, even in our own case.

If you are trying to judge consciousness in others, then their behavior is your best bet, I guess, though there's that original "pragmatic" assumption always hiding behind the curtain like the Wizard of Oz-- that your observations are at least a reasonable representation of an underlying objective reality. If you are trying to define what consciousness IS and why it exists, then none of that matters, unless you can see others' qualia.

Your usage is huge, pregnant, filled to bursting.... and contains things which you claim cannot be or have not been demonstrated.  Mine is specific, and demonstrable.

Demanding this criterion basically says, "Whatever is a mystery must be redefined so it no longer sounds like a mystery." Redefinition for a science lab is great. You can get your Conscio-matic 3000 to watch things and decide whether they are interacting with the environment. But that has nothing to do with the philosophical point of interest, IMO.

 
My conscious is not my qualia, it is simply awareness - not any experience of that awareness.  There is a difference to me, as there is to you.  You and I can both demonstrate awareness.  You feel that qualia cannot be demonstrated.  Wouldn't qualia be demonstrable by the same means that awareness is demonstrated - if they're the same thing?  Perhaps you should divide a little as well, in fact I'm certain that you do.

It depends what you are aware of, and what you mean by awareness. Is this just adding another word into the mix for the semantic shell-game? I'd say that the awareness you are talking about still has an associate qualia: what it's like to be aware of things.

You may be bored...but there's alot of this boring stuff going on, and it has some amazing effects and combinations.  You can't really demonstrate that your qualia isn't one of them, and all the evidence we have suggests that it is.....as unbelievable or impossible as it may seem to be, to you.

It's only evidence because you operationalize the definitions to allow what you can observe to serve as evidence. That's not evidence of the actual capacity for experience that most people would call consciousness-- it is avoidance.

  It might be more interesting than you think...lol.

Okay, that was really a rhetorical statement. The science of mind, of AI, of robots, etc. is very interesting. And I understand that in that context, the word "conscious" as you define it is pragmatic. But I won't stand by and allow that definition to be conflated with the kind of consciousness that humans (and presumably other living things) have, because while you certainly can watch both living and non-living things to see how they interact with the environment, it seems very likely to me that all non-living things that you say are conscious are philosophical zombies at best.