Sam Harris On Defining Consciousness

[The Grand Nudger]

I get that in the current environment, it's up to the individual to define consciousness. But your definition based on action strikes me as ridiculous.

I define conscious as " being aware" - I -test- for awareness by using action, response, and that's not just how I test it........

It's ridiculously easy to write a program who's actions will fool people into thinking it's conscious. Eliza is a famous example. My wife likes to joke about the time she had a go with a Eliza. Eliza said, "You seem to feel intense." She replied, "In tents is where Arabs sleep." It's a joke but as you can imagine, Eliza would have choked on that badly.

-as would many human beings.......

It's possible of course to program a much more sophisticated search algorithm into Eliza that might make sense of that remark and recognize it as humor. I think I could write such a program myself and I wouldn't categorize myself as anything more than an intermediate-level programmer. It might be pretty convincing to the average person based on it's actions but do you really think such an Eliza 23.0 or whatever is actually aware of its existence, that it would feel terror as you reached for the computer off switch?

I don't know if it's aware of it's own existence,but that would be -self consciousnous-.  On the grounds you've provided and nothing else, I'd say no, it doesn't seem to be aware of it's own existence.  There are many things that don't seem to be aware of their own existence, most of the animals we've tested for that don't seem to be, or if they are, we can't tell. Regardless, most of them are conscious, or at least seem to be.

That's what we're talking about here. When we say, "consciousness," we're talking about something that feels its own existence, values it and is terrified of losing it - just like you and me. We're not talking about some relatively simple construct which can mimic the behavior of such.

There's a better, more specific term for something that is aware of it's own existence, rather than just it's surroundings.  Self conscious.  Theres a better, more specific term for valuing existence and being terrified..sentience.

That something is conscious does not mean that it is self conscious, or sentient. My calling something conscious is not calling them those other two. If I sound like a kook on any of this it;s because you;re either unfamiliar with these terms..or you've ignored the -many- posts in which I've made that crystal clear. If a person insists on lumping all of these things together, they're going to have trouble discussing them with any specificity. Theyre going to have trouble seperating problems with one, with problems with another. They're going to have trouble distinguishing, for example...between a worm, Eliza, and a human being logically and consistently in this context. It's trouble -of their own making- not trouble with the concepts or terms.

Computational models offer an explanation, btw, ATT. We aren't completely in the dark as to how a brain (or any structure) might produce these things we call experience. We just don't know if that's how -we- do it. As far as earthworms go, they're conscious by any measure we use to judge it in any other creature, or ourselves. That doesn't make them any of those other things, and there's still a long list of things that aren't conscious.