One of the gists is that the emergence of organic life is also the emergence of intentional consciousness, even at very rudimentary levels of development. Like, nothing matters to a crystal or a rock formation, but things definitely matter to a bacterium, because it has skin (or a membrane) in the game, so to speak. — Wayfarer

All life has "drives". Viruses have "drives", to infect and reproduce. Roombas have "drives", to clean. This is not enough. What is relevant is whether these drives are experienced as such. We don't just have drives, our drives are sometimes (but crucially, not always) experienced as drives. We have this capacity, this does not remotely mean that to have a drive is intrinsically to experience that drive.

I would like to think that the sentience of beings other than human is not something for us to decide. Whether viruses or archai or plants are sentient may forever remain moot, but that anything we designate with term 'being' is sentient as part of the definition (hence the frequent Buddhist reference to 'all sentient beings'.) — Wayfarer

I thought that 'all sentient beings' was making a distinction between these and insentient beings?

I don't see why it is problematic for us to conceptually mark out what counts as sentience. For me, to be sentient is to have qualitative states. It is quite another thing (maybe impossible) to empirically know whether other species have qualitative states.

The claim is that in order for you to be conscious of anything at all, that consciousness must have a felt quality. — hypericin

Again, what is "having a felt quality", if not "being conscious of a feeling"?

Have you said anything more than that being conscious is being conscious?

Seems to me that such an approach seems profound, seems to be providing an explanation, until one looks closely.

I would argue that qualia is the bedrock of sentience. — hypericin

Here's the same thing again; to be sentient is to perceive or feel; and saying "qualia is the bedrock of sentience" sounds cool, as if "Ah! Now we know! it's qualia that explain consciousness!"

But look again. Qualia are perceptions and feelings. so "qualia is the bedrock of sentience" just says "perceptions and feelings are the bedrock of sentience"...

The feeling of having an explanation dissolves... We've just said the same thing with different words.

Roombas have "drives", to clean. — hypericin

But they don't heal, grow, reproduce, or mutate. Agree that it's very hard to determine what is or isn't sentient at borderline cases such as viruses (presumably not) or jellyfish and so on.

Somewere I once read the aphorism that 'a soul is any being capable of saying "I am"'. i rather liked that expression.

One of the gists is that the emergence of organic life is also the emergence of intentional consciousness, even at very rudimentary levels of development. — Wayfarer

Also the emergence of information processing.

I thought that 'all sentient beings' was making a distinction between these and insentient beings? — hypericin

Can you give me an example of an insentient being?

The second two examples use "aware" in its other sense, which is simply to know a certain fact.
To be aware of a mosquito bite, aware of a sunset, aware of a feeling of jealousy, are all qualitative states. There is something it is like to experience each of these. What each is like is quite different. What unifies them is that they are all varieties of qualitative conscious states, they each have a felt quality. "Qualia" bundles this property of having a felt quality into a conceptual bucket. — hypericin

IMO I don't even think that we can say that one can 'know' something without a qualitative experience.

For instance, I don't think that my computer 'knows' the information it processes and stores. Rather, it seems to me that qualitative experience is a precondition of 'having knowledge'. So, while I think the distinction you make is relevant, I believe that we should say that 'knowledge' is a specific kind of 'awareness' (in the general sense of the presence of a qualitative experience).

:lol: I didn't necessarily think I was blowing anyone's doors down! But I don't think I said nothing either.

Just look at all the ways consciousness has been defined in the past. You just said the term was up to us to define. Wayfarer just quoted:

Somewere I once read the aphorism that 'a soul is any being capable of saying "I am"' — Wayfarer

Consciousness has never been a clear, fixed concept. Whereas qualia, your feelings about the term aside, is much more precisely defined. If the unclear term can be defined in terms of the clear term, even seeming tautologously, then that is progress. At least we would know what we are talking about when we talk about consciousness. Does that explain consciousness? Of course not.

Agree that it's very hard to determine what is or isn't sentient at borderline cases such as viruses (presumably not) or jellyfish and so on. — Wayfarer

Viruses are a hard no. They don't even have volition, they make no decisions, they are essentially giant, extraordinarily complex, free floating molecules. Jellyfish seem to be the upper limit of what can be achieved with no central nervous system. Probably not, but as you say it is extremely hard to rule out entirely.

My hunch is that consciousness is the ultimate fulfillment of the engineering principles of modularization and abstraction. It is an extremely efficient strategy for abstracting and organizing information that would otherwise overwhelm the nervous system. We have to integrate all the physical senses, bodily senses, emotions, memories, thoughts. Based on this enormous mass of information, we are supposed to act, moment by moment. If there were no abstraction, if these were all just raw electrical inputs, the brain would be totally overwhelmed. So the brain's strategy is to transform these raw inputs into abstractions, and act based on them. Our lived experience is that of the brain's decision maker. Our world consists in these abstractions, qualia, and from them, we attend to the relevant subset, we predict, and we act.

This strategy has probably coevolved multiple times in different evolutionary branches. To detect consciousness, we would have to understand the principle whereby the brain achieves this kind abstraction, and examine the extraordinarily complex nervous systems of the animals that might be using it.

So we accept a poor definition over contemplating that consciousness is an ambivalent notion?

In first aid we are taught to test to see if someone is unconscious by asking for a response - "can you hear me? Open your eyes! What's your name? Squeeze my hand!". Some folk tend to forget this sort of thing doesn't apply to jellyfish and rocks.

In extremis, people may be conscious but unresponsive, which has led to a body of work looking for "no-report" tests for consciousness. One suggestion is that medical folk look for the "neural correlate of consciousness", which face the problem of how to establish conscious experience without first-person evidence. No-report paradigms rely on eye-movement, neuro-imaging, or physiological measures as indicators of consciousness. The trouble with no-report approaches is that they tend to diagnose cases of consciousness as cases of unconsciousness, the “bored monkey” problem, in which a monkey appears unconscious because it fails to follow the red dot, when it's just bored. Perhaps the panpsychists are right, and we are attributing unconsciousness ot rocks that are simply bored.

At the other extreme, would it make sense to insist that someone was unconscious, despite their protests to the contrary?

Is it that we have not yet found a clean and clear definition of consciousness, or is it that consciousness is not one thing, with a clean and clear definition?

Should we shoehorn consciousness into a definition, or learn to work with a level of ambiguity?

Should we shoehorn consciousness into a definition, or learn to work with a level of ambiguity? — Banno

What you are describing is not conceptual ambiguity, but rather epistemic ambiguity. We pick and choose our concepts, and I think mine cleanly maps to that which we are talking about when we talk of consciousness. It is an entirely different matter to reliably apply this concept to other beings. Qualia, and therefore consciousness, is private, as third person observers we only have indirect access, through behavior and self report.

Is it that we have not yet found a clean and clear definition of consciousness, or is it that consciousness is not one thing, with a clean and clear definition? — Banno

"I shall not today attempt further to define the kinds of material I understand to be embraced within that shorthand description ('hard-core pornography'); and perhaps I could never succeed in intelligently doing so. But I know it when I see it, and the motion picture involved in this case is not that." — Justice Potter Stewart

What you are describing is not conceptual ambiguity, but rather epistemic ambiguity. — hypericin

I don't think so. Rather what you see as epistemic - an inability to know if someone is conscious - is the result of thinking about a family of related notions as if they were a single notion.

It's a mistake to think of consciousness only in terms of having a particular object, some private quale. The very idea of a private definition of consciousness is a philosophical artefact born of misusing words like “experience” and “inner” together with a misguided notion of essential characteristics. A picture that holds us enthralled.

Now I think I've demonstrated that, over the last page or so. I don't see that there is an account of qualia that can hold it's own.

None of what I've said here is to claim that we are not conscious. That's a common error hereabouts. What is shown is the poverty of adopting only one account, the possession of quale, as the arbiter of consciousness.

You do realise, though, that the use of this term 'quale' or 'qualia' is almost entirely unique to a very narrow band of discourse, conducted mainly by English and American academic philosophers, in respect of a very specific set of arguments? I've always seen it as a way of re-framing the debate in analytical terms which allow for the designation of the qualities of conscious experience as a spurious object in the attempt to defuse the cogency of Chalmer's original argument.

I've always seen it as a way of re-framing the debate in analytical terms — Wayfarer

Analytic philosophy is a broad church.

But that last paragaph is somewhat ambiguous. You see qualia as a way of undermining Chalmers? But for him the “hard problem” relies on the reality/cogency of qualia.

You do realise, though, that the use of this term 'quale' or 'qualia' is almost entirely unique to a very narrow band of discourse, — Wayfarer

Only if modern analytic discourse on consciousness is a narrow band in its entirety.

allow for the designation of the qualities of conscious experience as a spurious object — Wayfarer

Only grammatically. I don't see the nounification of "objects of consciousness" as carrying any particular ontological commitments.

Like @Banno I don't see how this is deployed against Chalmers, as I recall he makes use of the idea, which predates him by quite a bit.

Only if modern analytic discourse on consciousness is a narrow band in its entirety. — hypericin

I think it is, rather. The 'consciousness studies' discipline that developed in the early 1990's around Chalmers and a few others was much broader ranging than analytic phiiosophy. It included perspectives from cognitive science, phenomenology, psychology and many other disciplines. I didn't have Chalmers in mind when I made that remark, so much as his legendary opponent, Daniel Dennett. Chalmers does reference it in his original Facing Up paper, though:

The really hard problem of consciousness is the problem of experience. When we think and perceive, there is a whir of information-processing, but there is also a subjective aspect. As Nagel (1974) has put it, there is something it is like to be a conscious organism. This subjective aspect is experience. When we see, for example, we experience visual sensations: the felt quality of redness, the experience of dark and light, the quality of depth in a visual field. Other experiences go along with perception in different modalities: the sound of a clarinet, the smell of mothballs. Then there are bodily sensations, from pains to orgasms; mental images that are conjured up internally; the felt quality of emotion, and the experience of a stream of conscious thought. What unites all of these states is that there is something it is like to be in them. All of them are states of experience.

It is undeniable that some organisms are subjects of experience. But the question of how it is that these systems are subjects of experience is perplexing. Why is it that when our cognitive systems engage in visual and auditory information-processing, we have visual or auditory experience: the quality of deep blue, the sensation of middle C? How can we explain why there is something it is like to entertain a mental image, or to experience an emotion? It is widely agreed that experience arises from a physical basis, but we have no good explanation of why and how it so arises. Why should physical processing give rise to a rich inner life at all? It seems objectively unreasonable that it should, and yet it does.

If any problem qualifies as the problem of consciousness, it is this one. In this central sense of "consciousness", an organism is conscious if there is something it is like to be that organism, and a mental state is conscious if there is something it is like to be in that state. Sometimes terms such as "phenomenal consciousness" and "qualia" are also used here, but I find it more natural to speak of "conscious experience" or simply "experience".

Why 'more natural?' Because 'qualia' is academic jargon for something we are all intimately familiar with, namely, our experience of existence.