I found this article on the Brain Preservation Foundation's blog that covers a lot of common theories of consciousness and shows how they kinna miss the point when it comes to determining if certain folks should or should not upload our brains if given the opportunity.
Hence I see no reason to agree with Kuhn’s pessimistic conclusions about uploading even assuming his eccentric taxonomy of theories of consciousness is correct. What I want to focus on in the reminder of this blog is challenging the assumption that the best approach to consciousness is tabulating lists of possible theories of consciousness and assuming they each deserve equal consideration (much like the recent trend in covering politics to give equal time to each position regardless of any empirical relevant considerations). Many of the theories of consciousness on Kuhn’s list, while reasonable in the past, are now known to be false based on our best current understanding of neuroscience and physics (specifically, I am referring to theories that require mental causation or mental substances). Among the remaining theories, some of them are much more plausible than others.
Thanks for the post, I really liked the article overall. Nice general summary of the ideas. I agree with torekp. I also think that the term consciousness is too broad. Wanting to have a theory of consciousness is like wanting to have a "theory of disease". The overall term is too general and "consciousness" can mean many different things. This dilutes the conversation. We need to sharpen our semantic markers and not to rely on intuitive or prescientific ideas.Terms that do not "carve nature well at its joints" will lead our inquiry astray from the beginning.
When talking about consciousness one can mean for example:
-vigilance/wakefulness
-attention: focusing mental resources on specific information
-primary consciousness: having any form of subjective experience
-conscious access: how the attended information reaches awareness and becomes reportable to others
-phenomenal awareness/qualia
-sense of self/I
Neuroscience is needed to determine if our concepts are accurate (enough) in the first place. It can be that the "easy problem" is hard and the "hard problem" seems hard only because it engages ill posed intuitions.
I agree re: consciousness being too broad a term.
I use the term in the sense of "having an experience that isn't directly observable to others" but as you noted, people use it to mean LOTS of different other things. Thanks for articulating that thought.