Sam Harris On Defining Consciousness

[AFTT47]

That's news to me. I'd love to see someone demonstrate that an earthworm is conscious.

Can you demonstrate that anything is conscious?

No. The best I can do is point to the fact that we can modify feeling and behavior with drugs in a predictable fashion. That suggests to me that consciousness is a byproduct of processes of the physical brain. But I don't know how it works as there is no theory of chemistry or electromagnetism that can account for those processes resulting in consciousness. I can observe that a human being seems a lot more with it than an iguana which in turn demonstrates more intelligence than a roach. But I cannot say where the critical threshold is which is the minimum bar for consciousness. I can only observe that the brain of an earthworm is so simple, we have mapped the entire thing and we can see how it works. The functionality is simplistic, a simple search algorithm. If that is conscious, what to heck isn't?