My hunch is that with your interview setup you’re not getting people to elaborate the meaning of their terms but to sketch their theories of consciousness. We should expect some convergence for the former but a lot of disagreement about the latter—which is what you found.
By excluding “near-synonyms” like “awareness” or “experience” and by insisting to describe the structure of the consciousness process you’ve made it fairly hard for them to provide the usual candidates for a conceptual analysis or clarification of “consciousness” (Qualia, Redness of Red, What-it-Is-Likeness, Subjectivity, Raw Character of X, etc.”) and encouraged them to provide a theory or a correlate of consciousness.
(An example to make my case clearer: The meaning/intension of “heat” is not something like “high average kinetic energy of particles”—that’s merely its extension. You can understand the meaning of “heat” without knowing anything about atoms.
But by telling people to not use near-synonyms of “heat” and instead focus on the heat process, we could probably get something like “high average kinetic energy of particles” as their analysis.)
It’s a cool survey, I just don’t think it shows what it purports to show. Instead it gives us a nice overview of some candidate correlates of consciousness.
My hunch is that with your interview setup you’re not getting people to elaborate the meaning of their terms but to sketch their theories of consciousness. We should expect some convergence for the former but a lot of disagreement about the latter—which is what you found.
By excluding “near-synonyms” like “awareness” or “experience” and by insisting to describe the structure of the consciousness process you’ve made it fairly hard for them to provide the usual candidates for a conceptual analysis or clarification of “consciousness” (Qualia, Redness of Red, What-it-Is-Likeness, Subjectivity, Raw Character of X, etc.”) and encouraged them to provide a theory or a correlate of consciousness.
(An example to make my case clearer: The meaning/intension of “heat” is not something like “high average kinetic energy of particles”—that’s merely its extension. You can understand the meaning of “heat” without knowing anything about atoms.
But by telling people to not use near-synonyms of “heat” and instead focus on the heat process, we could probably get something like “high average kinetic energy of particles” as their analysis.)
It’s a cool survey, I just don’t think it shows what it purports to show. Instead it gives us a nice overview of some candidate correlates of consciousness.