I've said this before, but you can't, and honestly don't need to start from definitions to be able to do meaningful research and have meaningful conversations about consciousness (though it certainly would be preferable to have one rather than not have one).

There are many research areas where the object of research is to know something well enough that you could converge on such a thing as a definition, e.g. dark matter, intelligence, colony collapse syndrome, SIDS. We nevertheless can progress in our understanding of them in a whole motley of strategic ways, by case studies that best exhibit salient properties, trace the outer boundaries of the problem space, track the central cluster of "family resemblances" that seem to characterize the problem, entertain candidate explanations that are closer or further away, etc. Essentially a practical attitude.

I don't doubt in principle that we could arrive at such a thing as a definition that satisfies most people, but I suspect you're more likely to have that at the end than the beginning.

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HarHarVeryFunny 3 days ago | parent [-]

I think one of the main problems with defining consciousness (or rather being more specific when you use that word) is that (at least in the English language) it's a heavily overloaded word and is used to refer to a bunch of only loosely related, as well as totally unrelated, things! Also, most people aren't used to teasing apart consciousness-adjacent concepts like consciousness itself (essentially self-observation) and things like free will and sensory qualia, since these are less part of everyday discussion.

It's not so much that consciousness itself is mysterious or hard to define, but rather that the word itself, in common usage, just means different things to different people. It'd perhaps be better to make up a brand new baggage-free word, with a highly specific defined meaning (ability to self-observe), when talking about consciousness related to AI.

Free-will and qualia when separated out as concepts don't seem problematic as part of a technical vocabulary since they are already well defined.

	▲	glenstein 2 days ago \| parent [-]
		I certainly agree with your assessment that it's got multiple definitions and intuitions of all sorts, and that they cause chaos, and that one way of making progress is by isolating those out and clarifying. I'm not sure I agree with this idea that the essence of consciousness is self-reflection, because that seems to exclude important things. It seems like there might be simple states of being that involve some kind of phenomenal (in the philosophy sense) experience, some amount of qualia, some amount of outwardly directed awareness, some amount of "something it's like to be". And it seems to me that there might be life forms for whom there's an engagement with an interaction with that phenomena that involves having internal mental states, but that might not necessarily have self-reflection. It might be something closer to instinctual functioning or response to incentive. It recently blew my mind to learn that there's studies strongly suggesting honey bees are conscious. And from my perspective that raises questions for things all the way down to fruit flies. It seems like there might be a continuum a simple states through complex ones and that some of the simpler ones might not include self-awareness. If such a thing as sense of self is necessarily implicit in such a way that satisfies that definition, anytime we talk about qualia, then it would seem to be a moot point. Which raises another issue, which is that some of these things might be correctly regarded as entangled, and having an integral relation between them. I also think I kind of agree and disagree about qualia being well defined. I think it's probably the closest to what most people have in mind when they say there's no such thing as a definition of consciousness. And I think it's a sense of despair toward the broader research project of tying an understanding of qualia to an understanding of the physical world that relies on third-person descriptions. Now all of that said you seem like you don't have an attitude of treating the definition problem as one that preempts and stops everything, so there's a pretty fundamental way in which I'm probably in agreement with you more than disagreement. I think that clarifications of the type that you're talking about give us everything we need to iterate forward in a constructive way in talking about it and researching it.