When someone asks "Is blue blue?" they implicitly mean "What is blue?" or equivalently "Does blue mean what we think it does?" Blue has both an objective and su

When someone asks "Is blue blue?" they implicitly mean "What is blue?" or equivalently "Does blue mean what we think it does?" Blue has both an objective and subjective meaning, which today we see has different (i.e. electromagnetic spectra vs psychovisual perception). The question raised in the article is basically, "Is human consciousness special?" When Copernicus questioned the Earth's special place at the center of the Universe, it upset people immensely. Similarly, Darwin's ideas upset massive numbers of people to this day by suggesting that we are the product of relatively mundane forces. Human beings naturally tend to believe that they are special and that mere mechanisms cannot match their extraordinary attributes. It's clearly upsetting to people to suggest that people are not "conscious," but in fact the spirit of the question is useful and sobering. "Consciousness" and "awareness" are loaded terms, often tinged with connotations bordering on mysticism. "Attention" is generally a more mundane word. We have no qualms recognizing engineered attention systems, while most would balk at describing them as "self-aware", or "conscious." If we define consciousness as a system with reflexive attention, then human are conscious but so are certain computer systems. What's in dispute is the quasi-mystical, highly anthropomorphic conception of consciousness, by whatever name, verses a more mundane and objective notion of sensing and modeling external and internal events.