It really helps if we just taboo the word “consciousness” because people have too many implicit associations wrapped up in what they want that word to mean.
On a day to day level, we want “conscious” be to a stand-in for something like “things that have subjective experiences like mine”. This is unfortunately not very useful, as the world is not carved up into thing that are like this and not, other than for other humans.
On the other, if we try to get technical about what we mean for things to be conscious, we either end up at panpsychism by deflating the notion of consciousness (I’m personally supportive of this and think in many cases we should use “consciousness” to refer to negative-feedback control systems because these are the smallest unit of organization that has subjective information), or we end up with convoluted definitions of consciousness to add on enough qualifiers to avoid deflation.
“Consciousness” is a word people are really confused about and have lots of different competing intuitions about what it should mean and I really wish we’d just stop saying it and talk about what we mean directly instead.
I tried some different definitions of consciousness while writing this point, until settling on “able have subjective experiences that transcend the ‘easy problems of consciousness’”
Do you have any suggestions for making this more precise?
Feels like this has too much wiggle room. Like what counts as an “easy” problem of consciousness and what counts as “transcending” it? Generally good definitions avoid words that either do too much work or invite judgement calls about what counts.
I meant if you had any suggested rewords, because there don’t seem to be any perfect definitions of these concepts.
“Easy problems of consciousness” is an established term that is a bit better-defined than consciousness. By transcending, I just meant beyond what can be explained by solving the easy problems of consciousness
It really helps if we just taboo the word “consciousness” because people have too many implicit associations wrapped up in what they want that word to mean.
On a day to day level, we want “conscious” be to a stand-in for something like “things that have subjective experiences like mine”. This is unfortunately not very useful, as the world is not carved up into thing that are like this and not, other than for other humans.
On the other, if we try to get technical about what we mean for things to be conscious, we either end up at panpsychism by deflating the notion of consciousness (I’m personally supportive of this and think in many cases we should use “consciousness” to refer to negative-feedback control systems because these are the smallest unit of organization that has subjective information), or we end up with convoluted definitions of consciousness to add on enough qualifiers to avoid deflation.
“Consciousness” is a word people are really confused about and have lots of different competing intuitions about what it should mean and I really wish we’d just stop saying it and talk about what we mean directly instead.
I tried some different definitions of consciousness while writing this point, until settling on “able have subjective experiences that transcend the ‘easy problems of consciousness’”
Do you have any suggestions for making this more precise?
Feels like this has too much wiggle room. Like what counts as an “easy” problem of consciousness and what counts as “transcending” it? Generally good definitions avoid words that either do too much work or invite judgement calls about what counts.
I meant if you had any suggested rewords, because there don’t seem to be any perfect definitions of these concepts.
“Easy problems of consciousness” is an established term that is a bit better-defined than consciousness. By transcending, I just meant beyond what can be explained by solving the easy problems of consciousness