> Why isn't it acceptable to define consciousness as the operating instructions of the mind? Because that's not what's being debated. You can use words any way

> Why isn't it acceptable to define consciousness as the operating instructions of the mind? Because that's not what's being debated. You can use words any way you want, if you don't care about communicating, or you just want to dismiss an argument. But philosophically, consciousness means subjective experience. When I experience seeing red or being in pain, that has nothing to do with the abstract concept of "operating instructions". Now there might be the functional equivalent for that concept implemented by the brain when we have subjective experiences, at least on a computational view of the mind. But that's not equivalent to the experience itself. A red experience is not an operating instruction, because you can't write a red experience down, nor can you program the algorithm for that, or put it into an equation, but you can do so with an instruction. It's a category mistake to conflate an experience with a functional concept.