Yeah—Ford overstates it for my taste but I think the key realization is that if there's no inflection point at which the magic thing that is "consciousness" ari

Yeah—Ford overstates it for my taste but I think the key realization is that if there's no inflection point at which the magic thing that is "consciousness" arises, our intuitive conception of consciousness-as-such is wrong in a deep way. What I take out of this is not that consciousness doesn't exist, but that generally when people use the word "consciousness", the thing they think they're referring to doesn't exist in nearly as substantial a way as they think it does. We talk about ourselves as special and animals as fancy pattern matchers because we can't intuitively accept that consciousness isn't a binary phenomenon. If we accept that it's an emergent phenomenon with no clear boundary, there are only two possible conclusions: * Panpsychism or dual-aspect monism, where matter is imbued with proto-consciousness; or * "Illusionism" is maybe the best descriptor? Where consciousness exists but not in the way we think it does.