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> For me, consciousness is more than just perception, it's more like the awareness of your own thought processes. That is self-awareness, big difference. Consc
by Maursault 4y ago
> For me, consciousness is more than just perception, it's more like the awareness of your own thought processes.
That is self-awareness, big difference. Consciousness is required for self-awareness, but you are placing the bar too high for consciousness. Anything that has brain (in any form) that experiences and can feel pain is conscious, whether it is self-aware or not. A 1yo baby is not self-aware, but I'm pretty sure it is still conscious. It is a pretty good bet that all animals are conscious to some extent, including insects. It isn't a terrible bet that even plants have their own plant-consiousness, fungus has its own fungus-consciousness, etc.
- simonh 4y agoIf it's merely the ability to perceive and react to the environment then a Tesla is conscious. I'm just concerned that it's a very heavily loaded term that implies a lot of things that perception or awareness don't to the same degree. Philosophy programs, youtube channels and magazines don't do special episodes on the "problem of perception" because nobody would care (well in specialist journals maybe), but they do on consciousness. The only thing that makes discussions of consciousness interesting is the ambiguity in meaning, and the fact that some of it's meanings include self-awareness. It seems to me that those like Hoffman promoting a simplistic perception model and calling it consciousness is a kind of sleight of hand to make it seem cooler and more profound than it actually is.