[HervalFreire]

It's not about the fuzzy border. It doesn't matter if the border is fuzzy or not.

The point is the border doesn't exist in the first place. You created the border with the vocabulary. The concept itself is not intrinsic to reality. It was created. You came up with the word white and you made an arbitrary border. Whether that border is fuzzy or not is defined by you. It's made up.

We have a gradient. That's all that exists. You came in here and decided to arbitrarily call a section white and another section black. You made up the concepts of black and white. But those concepts are arbitrary. So it's pointless to argue about the border. Does it matter where the border is? Does it matter if the border is fuzzy? No. You'd be just arguing about pointless vocabulary and arbitrary definitions of the word black and white. The argument is not deep or meaningful it is simply a debate about English semantics.

Same with consciousness. We have a gradient for intelligence and awareness from something really stupid to something really intelligent. Does it really matter where we demarcate where something is conscious? and where it is not? Likely no, because the demarcation is arbitrary.

It's illusive but when people debate about consciousness. Oftentimes it could be that they are just debating about Vocabulary. Consciousness could be some word that's just poorly defined; it doesn't make sense to do a deep analysis on an arbitrary vocabulary word.

[ToValueFunfetti]

If a gradient exists in reality, establishing where along the gradient you are is a meaningful statement about reality.

It may not be exactly clear where a temperature becomes 'hot', but the sun is still not a great place to host your wedding. If I ask a designer for black text on a white page and they come back with gray text on a gray page, nobody is going to be able to read it. My complaint to the designer or the head of tourism on the sun is not a semantic one, it has very real implications beyond linguistic.

I disagree that consciousness is along the axis of intelligence and awareness. My computer is aware of a thousand services and is smart enough to allocate resources to each of them and perform billions of mathematical operations in a second. My cat thinks his tail is a snake sometimes, and has never performed so much as an addition. But my best guess is that the cat is the conscious one. I expect you can produce qualia with no intelligence or awareness at all.

[HervalFreire]

>It may not be exactly clear where a temperature becomes 'hot', but the sun is still not a great place to host your wedding.

But right now we are currently at the border. LLMs are nearing the line of demarcation. So everyone is arguing about where that line is.

So it's not about the extremes because the extremes are obvious. We are way past the negative extreme and approaching or even past the border.

The point is that the position of this border is not important. It's a made up border. So if I say we are past the border or before it the statement is not important because its an arbitrary statement.