This is a very nice meta-level discussion of why consciousness discourse gets so bad, and I do genuinely appreciate trying to get cruxes and draw out the generators of a disagreement, which is useful in difficult situations.
One factor that is not really discussed, but amplifies the problem of discourse around consciousness is that people use the word consciousness to denote a scientific and a moral thing, and people often want to know the answer to whether something is conscious because they want to use it to determine whether uploading is good, or whether to care about someone, and way too much discourse does not decouple these 2 questions.
I actually slightly voted against the linked post below in the review, due to methodological problems, but I have a high prior that something like this is a huge contributor to consciousness discourse sucking, and this is an area where the science questions need to be decoupled from value questions:
+9 for drawing out a generator on a very confusing topic, and should be in the LW canon for how to deal with difficult disagreements as a worked example.
I’m not going to review the object level on what consciousness actually is, because I already did that in a different review linked below, but the sneak peek is that I’m in camp 1, though you could also call me a camp 2 person, but notably reductionist/computationalist rather than positing novel metaphysics:
This is a very nice meta-level discussion of why consciousness discourse gets so bad, and I do genuinely appreciate trying to get cruxes and draw out the generators of a disagreement, which is useful in difficult situations.
One factor that is not really discussed, but amplifies the problem of discourse around consciousness is that people use the word consciousness to denote a scientific and a moral thing, and people often want to know the answer to whether something is conscious because they want to use it to determine whether uploading is good, or whether to care about someone, and way too much discourse does not decouple these 2 questions.
I actually slightly voted against the linked post below in the review, due to methodological problems, but I have a high prior that something like this is a huge contributor to consciousness discourse sucking, and this is an area where the science questions need to be decoupled from value questions:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/KpD2fJa6zo8o2MBxg/consciousness-as-a-conflationary-alliance-term-for
+9 for drawing out a generator on a very confusing topic, and should be in the LW canon for how to deal with difficult disagreements as a worked example.
I’m not going to review the object level on what consciousness actually is, because I already did that in a different review linked below, but the sneak peek is that I’m in camp 1, though you could also call me a camp 2 person, but notably reductionist/computationalist rather than positing novel metaphysics:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/FQhtpHFiPacG3KrvD/seth-explains-consciousness#7ncCBPLcCwpRYdXuG