Comment by pydry
9 hours ago
We're pretty clear on the distinction between a conscious and an unconscious human.
We might not clearly understand the diff between the two states but we can certainly point to it and go "it's that".
9 hours ago
We're pretty clear on the distinction between a conscious and an unconscious human.
We might not clearly understand the diff between the two states but we can certainly point to it and go "it's that".
I'm not sure it's that clear. What about a person who is on drugs to the point they clearly don't know what reality is happening around them, but they are able to speak and move and such? I'm not sure I'd call that conscious, but by most definitions it is.
You would just say that they have an altered experience of consciousness from the norm.
Indeed, doing a first aid course we were pointed out that sleeping is different from being unconscious. You can wake someone from sleep pretty quickly. You can't bring an unconscious person back in the same way.
>We're pretty clear on the distinction between a conscious and an unconscious human.
You are using unconscious as a synonym for asleep, which is not the same thing as having no conscious experience due to dreams. We are clear on the distinction between a dead human and an alive human however.
Unconsciousness is not the same thing as sleeping.
Im not sure where sleeping lies but it's probably somewhere between the consciousness and unconsciousness depending on which phase of sleep you are in and perhaps whether you are lucid dreaming.
Which is to say, this is still a mystery but it still isnt a definitional problem it's a regular old scientific mystery.
Now discuss whether a bonobo, a dog, a cat, a mouse, an ant, a bacterium is conscious.
And you’ll find it’s not as clear cut.
I'm pretty sure the mammals are conscious the same way I am, in that they experience qualia the same way I do. Insects and bacteria, I suspect not, but how could I tell?
There is no way to prove that other humans experience consciousness, really.
Those terms are not really how we use the word "conscious" in any other situation though. With a definition like that you would say a rock is unconscious (I guess reasonable), a pretty cold bacteria is unconscious (hmm.. ok I guess?), and a warm bacteria is conscious (now I'm not on board anymore).
We have to be WAY more specific in what the word even means!
I dont see a problem here. A warm bacterium is no more conscious than I am when I've been knocked out. Bacteria are alive but they arent conscious ever.
With your definition they clearly are. They move around, they respond to their environment and take decisive actions when needed. If a human does that they are absolutely "conscious" if you only mean it as the sense of conscious/unconscious.
If you define that bacteria are never conscious, you should be able to come up with a definition that doesn't accidentally make them conscious in your definition of the word without just arbitrarily adding "oh, but not bacteria" at some point.
I'll state it again: DEFINE THE WORD. People just argue and scream at each other and no one defined their terms. It's absolute madness to us who see that this is what happens. It's like arguing over the color of the sky and using the word "fnord" and no side has defined the frequency of light that "fnord" should correspond to. BOTH sides are wrong in that situation, because they both don't define the word.