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RichardKennaway comments on Open Thread: June 2010 - Less Wrong
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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?
What exactly do you mean by 'sensation'? Does it have to do with "subjective experience" and "qualia", or just the bare fact that you're modeling yourself as part of the world, like RomanDavis and Blueberry's definitions?
By "sensation" I mean the subjective experience.
If you ask me what I mean by "subjective" and "experience", well, you could follow such a train of questions indefinitely and eventually I would have no answer. But what would that prove? You're not asking for a theory of how consciousness works, but a description of the thing that such a theory would be a theory of.
Ask someone five centuries ago what they mean by "water" and all they'll be able to say is something like "the wet stuff that flows in rivers and falls from the sky". And you can ask them what they mean by "rivers" and "sky", but to what end? All you're likely to get if you press the matter is some bad science about the four elements.
"Consciousness" is in a similar state. I have an experience I label with that word, but I can't tell you how that experience happens.
That's great - I use the word in the same way. As far as I can tell, some other people don't - see the comments by RomanDavis and Blueberry that I linked to. This confusion over the meaning of the word is what I wanted to highlight.
The way that some others use the word (to mean "an agent that models itself" or "an agent that perceives itself"), either they have successfully dissolved the question of what subjective experience is, or I don't understand them correctly, or indeed different people use the word to mean different things.
And the reason I started out talking about that is that I've seen this cause confusion both on LW and elsewhere.