I’d love to engage with this at more length, and perhaps I’ll find time to. For now, I’ll share this Stanford encyclopaedia entry which I’ve found useful at times.
The sense I have[1] is that most philosophers think it’s important to have a term for what’s described there as what it is like and qualitative states (qualia), and that many agree that ‘consciousness’ is the most appropriate short term to use for that, but that indeed it is subject to horrendous conflation and worth qualifying where possible.
My take is that something like ‘5. Consciousness as experience of distinctive affective states’ is the nearest to this qualitative ‘what it is like’. I think that 1-4 and 7-17 are all separate and indeed separable properties of standard human wakeful qualitative experience[2] and that the word gets used colloquially to describe each. ‘6. Consciousness as pleasure and pain’ is a property that some of these qualitative states seem to have, whether they have the other properties or not, and which for me is obviously the dominant, if not sole, aspect of consciousness which matters morally. (Some people use ‘sentience’ for this, but that has its own conflations, and sometimes ‘affective states’ or ‘valenced states’, which are less ambiguous.)
Was the audience dominated by AI/ML/mathematics people? I’m just quite surprised at the lack of emphasis on qualitative states and instead on what seem obviously like computational properties which may or may not go along with qualitative states! Do they have another word for the qualitative experience thing? I want to suggest that many of these are people’s attempts to point at the ‘subjective/qualitative experience’ thing without realising it… but this feels very presumptuous of me, and not-truth-seeking. Maybe they really don’t know/care about that! For this reason (my surprise, which presumably implies others’ surprise also), thanks for this post.
‘standard’ and ‘wakeful’ because obviously in altered states and non-wakeful states we can have experiences which differ from these but which nonetheless have qualitative ’what it is like’ness!
I’d love to engage with this at more length, and perhaps I’ll find time to. For now, I’ll share this Stanford encyclopaedia entry which I’ve found useful at times.
The sense I have[1] is that most philosophers think it’s important to have a term for what’s described there as what it is like and qualitative states (qualia), and that many agree that ‘consciousness’ is the most appropriate short term to use for that, but that indeed it is subject to horrendous conflation and worth qualifying where possible.
My take is that something like ‘5. Consciousness as experience of distinctive affective states’ is the nearest to this qualitative ‘what it is like’. I think that 1-4 and 7-17 are all separate and indeed separable properties of standard human wakeful qualitative experience[2] and that the word gets used colloquially to describe each. ‘6. Consciousness as pleasure and pain’ is a property that some of these qualitative states seem to have, whether they have the other properties or not, and which for me is obviously the dominant, if not sole, aspect of consciousness which matters morally. (Some people use ‘sentience’ for this, but that has its own conflations, and sometimes ‘affective states’ or ‘valenced states’, which are less ambiguous.)
Was the audience dominated by AI/ML/mathematics people? I’m just quite surprised at the lack of emphasis on qualitative states and instead on what seem obviously like computational properties which may or may not go along with qualitative states! Do they have another word for the qualitative experience thing? I want to suggest that many of these are people’s attempts to point at the ‘subjective/qualitative experience’ thing without realising it… but this feels very presumptuous of me, and not-truth-seeking. Maybe they really don’t know/care about that! For this reason (my surprise, which presumably implies others’ surprise also), thanks for this post.
from not officially (but kinda secretly) being a philosopher, from reading a bunch and from talking to official philosophers
‘standard’ and ‘wakeful’ because obviously in altered states and non-wakeful states we can have experiences which differ from these but which nonetheless have qualitative ’what it is like’ness!