Consciousness does not have to mean being "mentally" (intellectually) aware of what's going on. It's about experiencing stuff, and having a _sensation_
Consciousness as it’s being discussed is not intelligence or even the ability to reason about one’s own existence. Is both less and more than those things, really just different altogether. It is subjective experience itself, the inner world somehow projected for you by your mind. It is the experience of seeing and hearing, the feeling of an emotion.
consciousness is dissimilar to awareness, in my limited understanding it is about feelings (experience) in itself and not about being aware of being aware about feelings.
You've made a huge leap from there-is-no-hard-problem-of-consciousness to there-is-no-consciousness. Consciousness is the experience of being something. I know it exists, because I'm experiencing it right now. The experience is consciousness, despite being illusory in many ways. Even a completely illusory experience is a conscious experience. In no way does it preclude my just being stuff, or other forms of stuff experiencing things too (and thus also being conscious). The mystery is how I can feel anything at all despite being just stuff.
I think the real problem is pretending that the phrase “what it feels like to be something” is going to act like a key in my dict of feelings.
A: You know, the feeling of what it is like to be something.
B: sits quietly, looks at ceiling Right, yeah, that feeling.
From a different angle, if OP wants to define “consciousness” as some feeling it sounds like he’s basically done. He’s labeled one of his feelings with the word “consciousness”. I’m not sure what point of contention remains.
Our consciousness is not who we are. Consciousness is only one aspect of the experience, and even if you grasp what causes consciousness, you still haven't addressed what you, the experiencer, are feeling.
Conscious means experiencing sensations of color, sound, pain in our mental construction of the world outside of us, or our internal thoughts. I don’t understand why people keep claiming they do t know what consciousness means. It’s spelled out clearly in the philosophical literature.
I think it means that consciousness isn't anything terrifically special and that human level consciousness is just something along the same spectrum with a more complicated model.
And it isn‘t just a number. A number doesn‘t feel like anything but pain does feel like something.
It would be honest to admit that we don‘t know why consciousness subjectively feels like anything. Pointing to complexity or integrated information doesn‘t explain this at all. It‘s easy to imagine a complex process that doesn‘t have a subjective experience.
This is a common attempt to rationalize away the hard problem of consciousness that I find to be an almost textbook example of "begging the question". What is a feeling? Well, it's a type of experience. Does a glass of water have experiences? Probably not, because experiences are phenomena that are relative to conscious entities. Saying that X has experiences or that X is conscious are, in my view, equivalent claims.
Saying that "consciousness is just a feeling" is equivalent to saying that "consciousness is just consciousness". It may sound like and explanation, but it is just a tautology.
> Saying that "consciousness is just a feeling" is equivalent to saying that "consciousness is just consciousness". It may sound like and explanation, but it is just a tautology.
I think you hit the nail in the head with that. Consciousness might very well just be a tautology, so the only definitions we are going to be able to produce are going to be circular or recursive.
However, this is a problem with written language in general. The definition of any word is only provided in the form of other words, which themselves are defined by words as well, so without an interpreter/reader that makes a connection from language to something else, language by itself can’t really have any meaning.
Consciousness is simply the awareness of being a person, and of having experiences. Do you not have that? I mean you don’t always have it, sometimes you are asleep or maybe sedated, but right now (whenever that is for you) as you are reading this?
"How can it happen that a physical creature comes to have this mysterious, magical stuff called consciousness? You reduce it down to something much more biological, like basic feelings, and then you start building up the complexities. A first step in that direction is “I feel.” Then comes the question, What is the cause of this feeling? What is this feeling about? And then you have the beginnings of cognition. “I feel like this about that.” So feeling gets extended onto perception and other cognitive representations of the organism in the world."
Seems to me like:
consciousness = a feeling or narrative of 'feelings', which arises out of a function that takes in all perception.
This. There's nothing magic about consciousness, and if you think it is, it's because your brains are hardwired to be convinced that you're special. But we're not.
In the article, this is said very well:
> Would you say that these more complicated states of emotion represent higher or more complex “levels” of consciousness?
> Seth: I’m personally very skeptical of this kind of labeling, of higher and lower levels of consciousness. There is a little truth to it, of course. Unless we can agree that human beings are in some sense, more conscious than, say, an ant, we’re missing some very important things about the nature of consciousness.
I feel you're falling in exactly the same trap as the article of assuming that the "feeling" is a property of the analytical machinery of our brains rather than gaining it's perceived complexity as an effect of being combined with that while being separate.
It seems wildly presumptuous to assume that lack of ability to communicate some level of awareness necessarily implies the awareness itself is lacking.
It could be, but we don't know, because we don't know what lies at the core of the subjective experience.
We don't even have a way of assessing what has and does not have consciousness.
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