[telmo]

> Consciousness seems to be a word that is poorly defined.

I will give you my favorite definition, given to me by my friend Bruno Marchal, a brilliant mathematician from Brussels who spent his life thinking about such topics:

"Consciousness is that which cannot be doubted."

It felt insufficient when he told me, but now I am convinced. It may require some introspection to "get it". It did for me.

[Der_Einzige]

That's just objectivity, and I don't think consciousness is synonymous with objectivity at all!

Cogitoist propaganda. The appearance of thought is not necessarily the same as thought, so you don't actually know you think just because you believe you think. The cogito (I think therefor I am), like your statement, is incoherent.

LLMs will swear up and down (with a prompt) that they are thinking beings, therefor "they are". They are not ontological actors because of their appearance of doubting their own existence. That's not thought!

[captainclam]

Addressing your first thought…anything that you would call “objective” can be “doubted” by ceding the tiny tiny possibility that you are a simulation or Boltzmann brain or brain in a vat. The evidence before you may not actually be representative of the “objective” reality.

The fact that there is experience at all, the contents of which may be “doubted”, cannot be doubted.

I’m not unequivocally claiming this but that’s the thrust of the argument.

[zero-sharp]

I'm sorry, but this makes me cringe. When we learn science, there's always some level of rigor with the ideas. Maybe there's some kind of justification with math, or some kind of experiment we can perform to remove doubt. The important features are reductionism and verifiability. It's not a weird introspection riddle.

I'm sure Bruno is brilliant. But I still don't know what consciousness is. And I think that "definition" doesn't meet the modern scientific standard. And I strongly oppose the idea that in order to learn science I should have to spend time introspecting.

[telmo]

Introspection is "looking within". Why should science not be interested in that? It is an aspect of reality. It is not more or less real than galaxies or atoms. I know that it is a very perplexing one when one holds a physicalist metaphysical commitment, which is easy to confuse with some notion of "no-nonsense modern scientific standard", and so there is a temptation to pretend the undeniable is not there, or that it is "ill defined" in some way.

[andrewflnr]

Think about what things "cannot be doubted", with all the brain-in-a-vat types of caveats. It's not trying to be a scientific definition. It operates earlier on the epistemological ladder than science can be meaningfully applied, and that might well be the only reasonable place to define consciousness. (I still can't call it a great definition, even if it did perfectly correspond with the concept. Too indirect.)