I’m not Critch and I haven’t read much philosophy, but I am the kind of person who he would have interviewed in the OP. It’s clear to me that there are at least two senses of the word “conscious”.
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There’s the mundane sense which is just a synonym for “awake and aware”, as opposed to “asleep” or “lifeless”. “Is the patient conscious yet?” (This is cluster 11 in the OP.)
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There’s the sense(s) that get brought up in the late-night bull sessions Critch is talking about. “We are subjective beings.” “There is something it is like to be us.”
I confess sense 2 doesn’t make any sense to me, but I’m linguistically competent enough to understand it’s not the same as sense 1. I know these senses are different because the correct response to “Are you conscious?” in sense 1 is “Yes, I can hear you and I’m awake now”, and a correct response to “Are you conscious?” in sense 2 is to have an hour-long conversation about what it means.
So, this claim is at odds with my experience as an English speaker:
the obvious answer to what people mean by consciousness is the fact that it is like something to be them, i.e., they are subjective beings.
Yeah, you and I agree that people can clearly distinguish between my senses 1 and 2. I was responding to Paradiddle, who I read as conflating the two — he defines “conscious” as both “awake and aware” and as “there is something it [is] like to be us”. I could have been clearer about this.
I believe grad students and Less Wrong users in these conversations are usually working with sense 2, but in fact sense 2 is multiple things and different people mean different things, to the extent they mean anything at all.
Paradiddle claims to the contrary that practically everyone in these conversations is talking about the same thing and just has different intuitions about how it works. But you seem to disagree with Paradiddle? Are you saying that Critch’s subjects aren’t talking about what you mean by “conscious”?