Comment by fasterik

The cogito argument is about cognitive processes (doubt, deception) which in my view don't depend on phenomenal consciousness. You may be right that the distinction isn't that important, since there's a parallel argument that goes "I experience, I am". It just felt like the article was name-dropping Descartes to support an argument about qualia that had little to do with what Descartes was talking about.

I don't think I worded the part about moral patienthood very clearly. The article presents two possible views as "if something is conscious, then humans should care about it" and "if humans care about something, then it's conscious". I'm saying that we need to keep three things separate: consciousness, moral patienthood, and what humans care about. Consider a being that perceives the redness of red, but has no preferences or positively or negatively valenced experiences; the moral obligation to keep a promise you made to someone who has died; the fact that for most of history, humans didn't care about slaves or non-human animals.

>Thus, I'm not entirely sure what "human care" means here, but absent humanity (or at least some conscious entity), I'm not sure any conception of morality is sensible.

It's the author's phrase, but I take it to mean that consciousness is socially constructed by "what humans care about" in the same way that music is constructed by "what humans like to listen to". There's no single definition because it's inherently a subjective concept.

I believe that making the human species fundamental to a theory of consciousness or a theory of ethics is doomed from the start. We just need to imagine other intelligent beings somewhere in the universe with the same kinds of beliefs, desires, and experiences as we have. It's not that I would say ethics is mind-independent, but it can't arbitrarily privilege one species above all others.