“Conciousness” is a dirty word, polluted by too many others to the point of uselessness. Similar in ken to “natural”, a weasel word that hides the true definition your argument is based upon. Arguing that something isn’t natural is really saying that something is gross, dangerous, weird, deformed, chemical, etc. but without needing to defend the actual argument made.
Conciousness has the same problem, it is a word that can be malformed and modified for any discussion to suit the needs of the interlocutor. Normally merely a curiosity it is rapidly coming into focus as a method of making strong moral statements. In this sense the term conciousness is closer to the ecclestical notion of the soul that dominated the narrative of Europe in the middle ages onwards. One can torture animals as they lack a soul, people that speak weird lack souls and can be enslaved, people not of our religion need their souls aligned or they go to hell, etc. With such a tool near anything can be justified if framed correctly.
Surely, one might say, non-religious people would not stoop to such contortions. That secular individuals have grown beyond such trappings. Woe be it for you too look into IQ-race discourse and find arguments that if someone cannot rotate a cube on paper fast enough, their entire ethnic group should be cleansed. If we were instead to peruse the documents of the past, we will find the term “sub-human” a nice bridge to be burnt. Both in the argument of ensoulment and the argument of intelligence these terms crop up.
We are liberals you cry! We do not denigrate people on race, or creed, or etc. Smuggling in people once again. When interrogated you easily pick Homo as your umbrella, the small leak of the brain-dead and the embryos easily patched with the application of brain-waves. Once again consciousness creeps into the conversation, a filler for the gap left from the soul in the scientifically minded. A place where God can hide once again. A God that has cast off the trappings of ritual and scripture in place of procedure and papers.
I reject this notion, personally. The term is a mess, it’s a method of hiding our worst inconsistencies. Just ask about the crows, the pigs, the elephants, and the whales. They show interiority, a space just for them that they carve into reality with emotional languages that humans can even relate to. They are not conscious in the way Humans are though, they are not deserving of rights or protections. The Crow Nation suffering in the margins as we neglect communication. What we care about is not consciousness, it’s the perception of consciousness. A raving mad human with less of a mind then a crow will be treated with more respect because…?
I ask we return back to the soul and interrogate it with new eyes. The reason the madman is treated with respect is because of their connection to the world in our minds eye. If the madman were the child of a prominent politician, then they represent power. If they were the remains of a genius scientist, then they represent social honor. If they were the mother of mine, then they represent a memory. In each case, my respect is not derived of their actual interiority. It is instead their memetics and homeostatics. How well do I identify them as a part of me, and how vital are they for “my” life to continue onwards.
For this argument qualia are defined as the internal notion of experience. To me this will eventually collapse into the notion of sensing. Does an arm have a qualia? Well, many would say no, but then you look at the reflex nervous system. A system with the ability to sense the quality of a feeling (pain hot ouchie), and proscribe a response before the rest of your mind is aware. Emotions are felt in the body, neuroception regulating how you feel before the thing you call “you” can feel it. Why would those not be considered qualia? What do they lack that your brain has? If they can, well that’s a problem as it allows one to step downwards into cells. There are receptors and metabolic webs tuned to strings of disordered biopolymers to sense the world around them. Eventually a line must be drawn, surely. For you, but not for me. I like my world continuous, I don’t like arbitrarily cutting my model off simply because the conclusion doesn’t make the world nice and neat and tidy.
The aspects of consciousness that are of import:
- Reflexive
- Recursive
- Complex
- Coherent