I’m not sure how we could say that there’s no phenomenon that the word “consciousness” refers to, it seems to me that it’s like questioning if reality itself exists: the point of “reality” is referred to the consistency of things we perceive, if we question if reality ‘exists’, we still find that consistency of things we perceive regardless, it seems to me that it’s analogous to questioning consciousness.
We don’t even know if human beings are conscious(...) how can you know if other people are conscious? Do you have a way to test if other people are conscious?
If I can identify the referent of the word “consciousness” at all, then I can see if the way other people speak about their experiences matches with that concept of “consciousness”, and they do. That’s evidence in favour of then being conscious.
And we can actually detect empirical differences between consciousness and non-consciousness, because there are people that perceive visual stimuli who say that are not aware of seeing anything (even while they could at some point of their lifes).
I’m not sure how we could say that there’s no phenomenon that the word “consciousness” refers to, it seems to me that it’s like questioning if reality itself exists: the point of “reality” is referred to the consistency of things we perceive, if we question if reality ‘exists’, we still find that consistency of things we perceive regardless, it seems to me that it’s analogous to questioning consciousness.
If I can identify the referent of the word “consciousness” at all, then I can see if the way other people speak about their experiences matches with that concept of “consciousness”, and they do. That’s evidence in favour of then being conscious.
And we can actually detect empirical differences between consciousness and non-consciousness, because there are people that perceive visual stimuli who say that are not aware of seeing anything (even while they could at some point of their lifes).