On naturalism and consciousness

[bennyboy]

Does some specific level of thought and meaning signify "sentient observer" status whereas another, perhaps lesser level signifies "just stuff happening"?

Let me start with sentience. As you know, I don't think sentience has any meaning if its determination requires arbitration: "X complexity means sentient, <X complexisty means not sentient." Therefore, the most primitie building block of sentience has to be rooted in a kind of atomic consciousness (by which I mean an indivisible minimal consciousness, not any relation to a physical atom, which is misnamed anyway)

That being said, there are certain ideas which are probably required to establish meaning at any given level of complexity. Just being minimally conscious, for example, wouldn't allow you to see meaning in people's behaviors. It's definitely possible, through reflection or drug use or meditation, to arrive at a mental state in which you can see light and hear sound, and perceive no deep meaning in any of it.

On the other hand, I'd argue a computer could see "meaning" in Chad's lightswitches. For example, it could process an alarm as a trigger for an escape behavior, or a bathroom light as a trigger for a cleanliness inspection algorithm.

But without the sentient experience of a motivated mind, these kinds of meaning aren't very meaningful, in the sense that people have the experience of meaningfulness. They are just assignations of outputs at one level to behaviors at a new level: the 0-->0, 1-->10, 2-->3 or whatever that I mentioned before. In this case, 0 means "do 0" and 1 means "do 10" and 2 means "do 3," and nothing more.