Said this in a different comment but I want to paste it here as well, since a lot of people seem to think "we don't even have a definition" is a show-stopping smackdown. But it isn't.

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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NoMoreNicksLeft 4 days ago | parent [-]

Dark matter is easily defined as "mass that cannot be detected by the current technology except that it affects the gravitation of galaxies". It is a detectable phenomenon. It is a measurable phenomenon.

Not having a definition is the show-stopping smackdown you say it is not. You are not a conscious being, there is no such thing as consciousness. You believe in an uninteresting illusion that you cannot detect or measure.

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glenstein 4 days ago | parent [-]

That's not a real definition, that's a placeholder for effects downstream of the real thing that isn't yet defined, the very kind of working definition I was talking about to begin with. We still don’t know if it’s WIMPs, axions, modifications of gravity, or something else entirely. If we do figure that out its something like those, that would be the definition, and you would be able to tell the difference between that and the thing you are presently calling a definition.

And, thankfully, a future physicist would not dismiss that out of hand because they would appreciate it's utility as a working definition while research was ongoing.

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NoMoreNicksLeft 2 days ago | parent [-]

>That's not a real definition, that's a placeholder for

Blah blah blah blahblah. If you can give me a definition even as poor as the one I gave for dark matter, that's all we're asking for. We don't need an explanation of the mechanism, we only need a way to measure the phenomenon. But you can't even do that.

	▲	glenstein a day ago \| parent [-]
		Neuroscience denialism is fascinating to me. It flies under the radar because we mostly hear about global warming denial, evolution denial or flat earther denial. But we have mountains of evidence of wakeful mental states being tied to measurable effects. Facial recognition is specific to a particular brain region, clearly tied to a mental event sufficient for working definition of a form of conscious activity, and only active when someone is conscious and picturing or imaging a face. Remarkably, damage to the area responsible for facial recognition can predict faceblindness. That is more than enough for a working definition of conscious activity, and that's just one example from mountains of them. Others include everything from wakefulness under anesthesia (which can be tested for and predicted based on EEGs), as well as which brain activity distinguish locked-in syndrome from persistent vegetative states. Not to mention mountains of evidence for how physical circumstances predict mental states, everything from psychedelics to iron deficiency. You can always retreat to the claim that nothing short of direct access to another's subjectivity "counts" but that's not how science works. We don't directly see dark matter either (or electrons or neutrons or magnetic fields etc), we see its effects and build theories around them.