We could make a machine that perceives, and perceives itself perceiving. So, if there is anything to be defined, it is probably defined by that. Are people who don't not conscious? What is common to everybody who insists, and also everybody they insist it about? They all observe themselves experiencing, and act on those observations. Why do they do this? That is something an explanation could address. There is a physical phenomenon: we observe people insisting there is such a thing as consciousness. People chasing consciousness are in the position of the biologists who insisted, in the face of biochemistry, that there was still a vital force. Now biology is mature enough to recognize that there is no such force. If physicalism is not true, then there is nothing here to explain.īiologists used to talk about a 'vital force'. If physicalism is true, then there is nothing here to explain. I am very wary of these kinds of hierarchical inversion though, they must be approached an examined extremely carefully because it's a very seductive intellectual failure mode. I suppose the argument is that consciousness might be a generalised attribute of complexity, or slightly more plausibly of information processing systems, but I see no evidence for this, and frankly no reason to believe it might be true. In this case the most common manifestation is conscious systems are complex systems (A is a kind of B where A=conciousness, B=complex), therefore complex systems are conscious (B is a kind of A). Phrased like that it's obviously false, but we see people doing this all the time. A is a kind of B, therefore B is a kind of A. I'm sorry but I don't see this as at all elegant, it's the usual hierarchical inversion error somewhat disguised. We are concious, so creatures like us must be concious, otherwise they're not 'like' us. >We get a more elegant situation if we suppose that consciousness is a necessary side effect of creatures like us. Or maybe it has an illusion of agency just like we do. Equally, since we can see how machines are made of smaller machines and so on, we can wonder if parts of us have consciousness and whether it is the same consciousness as our own, or if a group of people has a consciousness that experiences our world in some way but is unable to make its presence known because it exists at a level unconnected from the consciousnesses that direct human speech and action.

Which feels no less strange and magical, even if it is simpler, and took me straight to panpsychism, and the question of whether the machines we create might be conscious, and whether we are creating them to have pleasant, unpleasant, or neutral experiences. We get a more elegant situation if we suppose that consciousness is a necessary side effect of creatures like us. Despite having evolution to explain how we came to exist as complex information-processing organism, we would need an additional and entirely different explanation for why we happen to be conscious. If evolution could have created zombies, and equally possibly could have not created zombies, then consciousness would be a weird and unexplained chance occurrence. “Look, I’m not a zombie, and I pray that you’re not a zombie,” Chalmers said, one Sunday before Christmas, “but the point is that evolution could have produced zombies instead of conscious creatures – and it didn’t!”

Mindless automaton meaning