I agree that people use consciousness to mean different things, but some definitions need to be ignored as clearly incorrect. If someone wants to use a definition of ‘red’ that includes large amounts of ‘green’, we should ignore them. Words mean something, and can’t be stretched to include whatever the speaker wants them to if we are to speak the same language (so leaving aside things like how ‘no’ means ‘of’ in Japanese). Things like purposefulness are their own separate thing, and have a number of terms meant to be used with them, that we can meaningfully talk about if people choose to use the right words. If ‘introspection’ isn’t meant as the internal process, don’t use the term because it is highly misleading. I do think you are probably right about what Critch thinks when using the term introspection, but he would still be wrong if he meant that (since they are reflecting on word choice not on the internal states that led to it.)
I don’t feel very hopeful about the conversation atm, but fwiw I feel like you are missing a fairly important point while being pretty overconfident about not having missed it.
Putting a different way: is there a percent of people who could disagree with you about what consciousness means, which would convince you that you it’s not as straightforward as assuming you have the correct definition of consciousness, and that you can ignore everyone else? If <50% of people agreed with you? If <50% of the people with most of the power?
(This is not about whether your definition is good, or the most useful, or whatnot – only that, if lots of people turned out to be mean different things by it, would it still particularly matter whether your definition was the “right” one?)
(My own answer is that if like >75% of people agreed on what consciousness means, I’d be like “okay yeah Critch’s point isn’t super compelling”. If it was between like 50 − 75% of people I’d like “kinda edge case.” If it’s <50% of people agreeing on consciousness, I don’t think it matters much what definition is “correct.”)
I agree that people use consciousness to mean different things, but some definitions need to be ignored as clearly incorrect. If someone wants to use a definition of ‘red’ that includes large amounts of ‘green’, we should ignore them. Words mean something, and can’t be stretched to include whatever the speaker wants them to if we are to speak the same language (so leaving aside things like how ‘no’ means ‘of’ in Japanese). Things like purposefulness are their own separate thing, and have a number of terms meant to be used with them, that we can meaningfully talk about if people choose to use the right words. If ‘introspection’ isn’t meant as the internal process, don’t use the term because it is highly misleading. I do think you are probably right about what Critch thinks when using the term introspection, but he would still be wrong if he meant that (since they are reflecting on word choice not on the internal states that led to it.)
I don’t feel very hopeful about the conversation atm, but fwiw I feel like you are missing a fairly important point while being pretty overconfident about not having missed it.Putting a different way: is there a percent of people who could disagree with you about what consciousness means, which would convince you that you it’s not as straightforward as assuming you have the correct definition of consciousness, and that you can ignore everyone else? If <50% of people agreed with you? If <50% of the people with most of the power?
(This is not about whether your definition is good, or the most useful, or whatnot – only that, if lots of people turned out to be mean different things by it, would it still particularly matter whether your definition was the “right” one?)
(My own answer is that if like >75% of people agreed on what consciousness means, I’d be like “okay yeah Critch’s point isn’t super compelling”. If it was between like 50 − 75% of people I’d like “kinda edge case.” If it’s <50% of people agreeing on consciousness, I don’t think it matters much what definition is “correct.”)