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Is there any way you could have a being like a human, who when asked would say they're not conscious? Is a definition of consciousness allowing that possible?

• glenstein 3y ago
  I mean you certainly could, in the sense that you could get it to tell you the sky is green, and that it's the spirit of Rodney Dangerfield. To your point though, so far as I can tell it could not answer that question as a product by actively engaging conscious introspection to discover its own absence of consciousness, which I take to be your point. So if its way of answering involves dipping into its own active "theater" of consciousness it likely could not, at least given our usual understanding. However I do wonder if its something where that could actually be complicated to answer, and where, like illness, as we grow in understanding, it breaks out into all kinds of unexpected subclasses. I can, for instance, know, in a sense, that I can't see UV rays. But I am not so sure if consciousness writ large could every be tested for, via conscious introspection, and come out in the negative, even if we allow for the idea that it will explode into all kinds of nuances and subclasses with future research.