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Will_Sawin comments on Nature: Red, in Truth and Qualia - Less Wrong
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Huh? I am conscious of a lot of things that don't involve words. In fact, words are a very small part of my awareness, except when I'm actually using them, e.g. composing a comment like this one. They're a major way of communicating one's state of mind to someone else, but to identify consciousness with that facility would be like mistaking a computer screen for the computer.
I suppose that might change if one were to practice one of those meditation exercises in which one deliberately labels every moment of experience; but I don't know why one would want to do that.
I think it's more accurate to say that the part of our mind that is conscious is the part that uses words, since when you want to tell if someone knows something consciously or unconsciously, you ask them about it.
That's the same fallacy as I was trying to get at. I am conscious of a thing, or not, whether or not I tell anyone else, and it is easy to think of situations in which I can tell whether someone else is conscious of something without their saying anything. Words can tell you a lot, but they're telling you about something which is not those words, and is not the mechanism of producing those words.