What does 'consciousness' mean?
I'm having an email conversation with a friend about Nick Bostrom's simulation argument and we're now trying to figure out what the word "consciousness" means in the first place.
People here use the C-word a lot, so it must mean something important. Unfortunately I'm not convinced it means the same thing for all of us. What does the theory that "X is conscious" predict? If we encounter an alien, what would knowing that it was "conscious" or "not conscious" tell us? How about if we encountered an android that looked and behaved identically to a human, but inside its head had a very different physical implementation? What would saying it was "conscious" or "not conscious" mean?
And, what does this have to do with my personal subjective experience? It's the foundation (or medium) of everything I know or believe; but most definitions of what it is tend to be dualism-like in that, once again, saying someone else has or doesn't have subjective experience tells us nothing about the physical world.
Help appreciated!
What I mean by "consciousness" is my sensation of my own presence. Googling for definitions of "conscious" and "consciousness" gives mostly similar forms of words, so that concept would appear to be what is generally understood by the words.
Do philosophers have some other specific generally understood convention of exactly what they mean by these words?
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