I think any word would be better than “conciousness”! :) It really is a very confusing term, since it is often used (vaguely) to refer to quite different concepts.
Cognitive scientists often use it to mean something similar to “attention” or as the opposite of “unconscious”. This is an “implementation level” view—it refers to certain mechanisms used by the brain to process information.
Then there is what Ned Block calls “access consciousness”, “the phenomenon whereby information in our minds is accessible for verbal report, reasoning, and the control of behavior” (to quote Wikipedia). This is a “functional specification level” view: conciousness is correctly implemented if it lets you accurately describe the world around you or the state of your own mind.
Then finally there’s “phenomenological conciousness” or qualia or whatever you want to call it—the mystical secret sauce.
No doubt these are all interrelated in complicated ways, but it certainly does not help matter to use terminology which further blurs the distinction. Especially since they are not equally mysterious: the actual implementation in the brain will take a long time to figure out, and as for the qualia it’s hard to say even what a successful answer would look like. But at the functional specification level, it seems quite easy to give a (teleological) explanation. That is, it’s easy to see that an agent benefits from being able to represent the world (and be able to say “I see a red thing”) and to reason about itself (“each time I see a red thing I feel hungry”). So it’s not very mysterious that we have mental concepts for “what I’m currently feeling”, etc.
I think any word would be better than “conciousness”! :) It really is a very confusing term, since it is often used (vaguely) to refer to quite different concepts.
Cognitive scientists often use it to mean something similar to “attention” or as the opposite of “unconscious”. This is an “implementation level” view—it refers to certain mechanisms used by the brain to process information.
Then there is what Ned Block calls “access consciousness”, “the phenomenon whereby information in our minds is accessible for verbal report, reasoning, and the control of behavior” (to quote Wikipedia). This is a “functional specification level” view: conciousness is correctly implemented if it lets you accurately describe the world around you or the state of your own mind.
Then finally there’s “phenomenological conciousness” or qualia or whatever you want to call it—the mystical secret sauce.
No doubt these are all interrelated in complicated ways, but it certainly does not help matter to use terminology which further blurs the distinction. Especially since they are not equally mysterious: the actual implementation in the brain will take a long time to figure out, and as for the qualia it’s hard to say even what a successful answer would look like. But at the functional specification level, it seems quite easy to give a (teleological) explanation. That is, it’s easy to see that an agent benefits from being able to represent the world (and be able to say “I see a red thing”) and to reason about itself (“each time I see a red thing I feel hungry”). So it’s not very mysterious that we have mental concepts for “what I’m currently feeling”, etc.