> I’m also curious how you define consciousness.

This is what I came here for. Every article or commenter that attempts to deduce the roots of consciousness should first start by defining it. I have yet to see anyone even bother to seriously try.

If I spent all my time trying to figure out the fundamental forces involved in floopityjoop, but refused to ever define exactly what a floopityjoop was, you would ignore me, laugh at me, or feel pity for me.

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AndrewKemendo 2 hours ago | parent [-]

Hence why I ask

In my experience, “intelligence” and “consciousness” are socially defined categories and can’t be viewed objectively

There’s too much social weight on those to have a firm definition because the social implications are too grave and nobody is willing to give up their philosophy for a precise definition

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mapontosevenths 2 hours ago | parent [-]

Agreed, and just to add to that... It's important.

In the past many attempts to define who (or even what) is and is not conscious led to the exclusion of certain classes of human and animal, and from there to atrocity beyond measure. The p-zombie problem is not only fundamental, it may be the single most important question in all of philosophy and science from a "first do no harm" perspective.

It's not some academic "Umm acshually". The definition MATTERS, and can lead to real world suffering for living beings at massive scale when we get it wrong. So these regularly scheduled "Mechanism For Consciousness Discovered" blog posts that fail to define it first aren't just bad science, they're actively dangerous.

EDIT - To tie it back to this post - If we assume that working memory is involved in consciousness, we exclude people who lack short-term memory. I had a friend in high school who lost most of his due to a traumatic brain injury caused by a car accident. He was, in fact, a conscious being. Just... very, very forgetful and unable to cope well with novel situations.

	▲	d00d0ff000 12 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		I define consciousness as “the inflection of the potential of existential being.” As my original comment suggests, I claim consciousness as the echo chamber of the quantum domain. Before you call it “quantum magic” understand that the “potential of existence” is the foundation of existential reality and we are “just inflecting” upon this through the electrochemical biotechnology of our brains. I propose all life and living systems are “of consciousness” however primitive, and memory, temporal awareness, even sense of self are holographic renderings within this domain.