> I think it's difficult to have a serious discussion about consciousness online because it's such a mushy thing to define. It’s circular and self-referential.

> I think it's difficult to have a serious discussion about consciousness online because it's such a mushy thing to define. It’s circular and self-referential. In defining consciousness we, to phrase it in the least nuanced way, are trying to define a thing through which we define things. The best definition we have reduces to something along the lines of “what we, humans, experience”. By its very nature it makes us unable to fathom or even recognize a hypothetical consciousness if it is entirely unlike ours and/or operates on radically different scales; anything we call “conscious” is implied to be human-like.