A good start towards defining consciousness is to box it in with edge cases: a person in coma? a severely mentally retarded person? a person on hallucinogenic d

A good start towards defining consciousness is to box it in with edge cases: a person in coma? a severely mentally retarded person? a person on hallucinogenic drugs? a dog? The answers to these edge cases can help us separate possibly entangled concepts that seem to come under the umbrella of consciousness. I would concentrate on collecting empirical evidence, at the expense of developing further theoretical speculation along the lines of "p-zombies". I could see a Darwin-like figure traveling widely and recording detail minutely, and using it to make the case for simple unifying force behind an enormous spectrum of variation.