3 ms·

That's like saying if a doorbell is made of atoms, we've made atoms a useless term. A doorbell either has consciousness or it does not have consciousness. (I mi

That's like saying if a doorbell is made of atoms, we've made atoms a useless term. A doorbell either has consciousness or it does not have consciousness. (I might agree that if a doorbell has agency we might be making agency a useless term.) Consciousness as we understand it is defined in an ineffable way. We have individual experiences which we call 'consciousness' which roughly coincides with our subjective experience. As it stands, the term is fairly useless. Where we use it, we generally make the assumption that it applies or doesn't apply; almost exclusively in a self-serving way. If a doorbell is conscious and we can prove it, we will necessarily have a much greater understanding of consciousness and will have refined the term consciousness, making it more useful.

Dylan16807 7y ago
"atoms" isn't a useless term, but describing real-world observable objects as "atomic" is useless. In the same way we can talk about a spectrum and study of consciousness, but if the definition is to sense and respond to stimulus then the yes/no of "conscious" is always yes and therefore useless. I'm not sure what you mean by "prove it". A doorbell very clearly responds to a stimulus. ...if you mean the definition of the word, no word's definition has ever been "proven". People assign definitions to words.
- cgriswald 7y ago
  You're conflating the definition with the correlated properties. > if the definition is to sense and respond to stimulus then the yes/no of "conscious" is always yes and therefore useless. This isn't the definition. This is a hypothetical cause. The cause might be anything; we don't know (yet?) what objective indicators there might be of subjective experience. Consider seeing. In order for a thing (be it robot, animal, or human) to see, it must possess some type of sensory organ and a method to interpret the signals from that organ. So, to test for the ability to see, we can look for those things. We can be pretty sure that fish can see, because they possess eyes, brains, and respond to visual stimuli. That doesn't mean the properties has_sight_organ and has_brain are seeing. In the same way that physical matter is all made of atoms (loosely; let's not be pedantic), we might find that all things possess consciousness. We might not. But in neither case is the term made useless. Sure, if we find that to be the case, then describing a thing as conscious or not becomes similar to describing an object as atomic. But then we're just moving goalposts.

Dylan16807 7y ago

"atoms" isn't a useless term, but describing real-world observable objects as "atomic" is useless. In the same way we can talk about a spectrum and study of consciousness, but if the definition is to sense and respond to stimulus then the yes/no of "conscious" is always yes and therefore useless. I'm not sure what you mean by "prove it". A doorbell very clearly responds to a stimulus. ...if you mean the definition of the word, no word's definition has ever been "proven". People assign definitions to words.

cgriswald 7y ago
You're conflating the definition with the correlated properties. > if the definition is to sense and respond to stimulus then the yes/no of "conscious" is always yes and therefore useless. This isn't the definition. This is a hypothetical cause. The cause might be anything; we don't know (yet?) what objective indicators there might be of subjective experience. Consider seeing. In order for a thing (be it robot, animal, or human) to see, it must possess some type of sensory organ and a method to interpret the signals from that organ. So, to test for the ability to see, we can look for those things. We can be pretty sure that fish can see, because they possess eyes, brains, and respond to visual stimuli. That doesn't mean the properties has_sight_organ and has_brain are seeing. In the same way that physical matter is all made of atoms (loosely; let's not be pedantic), we might find that all things possess consciousness. We might not. But in neither case is the term made useless. Sure, if we find that to be the case, then describing a thing as conscious or not becomes similar to describing an object as atomic. But then we're just moving goalposts.