Consciousness is the ability of an organism to predict the future
The problem is that we want to describe consciousness as “that thing
that allows an organism to describe consciousness as ‘that thing that
allows an organism to describe consciousness as ´that thing that
allows an organism to describe consciousness as [...]´’”
To me consciousness is the ability to re-engineer our existing models
of the world based on new incoming data.
The issue presented at the beginning of the article is (as most
philosophical issues are) one of semantics. Philosophers as I
understand it use “consciousness” as the quality shared by things that
are able to have experiences. A rock gets wet by the rain, but humans
“feel” wet when it rains. A bat might not self-reflect but it feels
/something/ when it uses echo-location.
On the other hand, conciseness in our everyday use of the term is
very tied to the idea of attention and awareness, i.e. a “conscious
action” or an “unconscious motivation”. This is a very Freudian
concept, that there are thoughts we think and others that lay behind.
Start with the definition: A conscious being is one which is
conscious of itself.
You could probably use few more specific words to a greater effect.
Such as self-model, world model, memory, information processing,
directed action, responsiveness. Consciousness is a bit too
underdefined a word. It is probably not as much of a whole as a tree
or human as an organism is—it is not even persistent nor stable -
and leaves no persistent traces in the world.
“The only thing we know about consciousness is that it is soluble in
chloroform”—Luca Turin
I too gathered people’s varied definitions of consciousness for amusement, though I gathered them from the Orange Site:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16295769
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15289654
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17396444