From a medical perspective, the question of whether rather than to what degree a patient is conscious has serious ethical/practical importance. Basically, to treat a conscious patient you need his/her consent, for an unconscious one you don’t, because you’re excused for not getting it. So that variable, in a binary sense, is something every medical researcher is very aware of.
I agree that it is not ideal as a measure of how well someone is able to integrate information into his/her subjective worldmap (or however you want to define consciousness), but it is very available.
Basically, to treat a conscious patient you need his/her consent, for an unconscious one you don’t, because you’re excused for not getting it.
That’s really stretching the word “basically”. If a patient is unconscious and there’s an urgent issue that will cause serious injury if not addressed and it can’t wait until the patient regains consciousness and you did not have an opportunity to get consent while the patient was conscious, then you have an argument for not getting consent, but you can’t go around treating unconscious patients willy-nilly.
From a medical perspective, the question of whether rather than to what degree a patient is conscious has serious ethical/practical importance. Basically, to treat a conscious patient you need his/her consent, for an unconscious one you don’t, because you’re excused for not getting it. So that variable, in a binary sense, is something every medical researcher is very aware of.
I agree that it is not ideal as a measure of how well someone is able to integrate information into his/her subjective worldmap (or however you want to define consciousness), but it is very available.
That’s really stretching the word “basically”. If a patient is unconscious and there’s an urgent issue that will cause serious injury if not addressed and it can’t wait until the patient regains consciousness and you did not have an opportunity to get consent while the patient was conscious, then you have an argument for not getting consent, but you can’t go around treating unconscious patients willy-nilly.
You are correct. I omitted these points because they didn’t seem relevant to my point.