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> This is the exact wrong direction we should take if we want to have any hope of understanding consciousness. Can you expand on what direction that is and why

> This is the exact wrong direction we should take if we want to have any hope of understanding consciousness. Can you expand on what direction that is and why exactly it's wrong? I didn't see bongs mentioned in the article. > We should ask: is it really true that all humans are conscious, or is there something specific that triggers consciousness? How can that question possibly be answered without knowing what consciousness is? > If we refuse to even question these things, then of course we'll never come up with any answer. I didn't see this article as refusing to question those things. Very much the opposite. It's questioning the consciousness of everything, not just assuming that nothing is conscious because, well, you don't know...

xamuel 7y ago
>Can you expand on what direction that is and why exactly it's wrong? It makes the word "conscious" meaningless: if I coin a new term, "baffy", and define it as "Everything in the entire universe is baffy", then this doesn't help us understand anything at all. It pushes bubbles around under wallpaper: ok, if rocks are conscious, then all the hard questions of consciousness just change into hard questions of human consciousness. >How can that question possibly be answered without knowing what consciousness is? Similar to how questions about the nature of light were answered. Originally no-one knew what light is, and questions about what it is were just as hopeless as questions about what consciousness is. Perhaps there's some quirk of consciousness we just haven't noticed yet, and once we do notice it, suddenly consciousness will be testable.