Did you mean, "at present subjective"? Because if something is objectively measurable then it is objective. Are these things both subjective and objective?
To clarify, consciousness is a subjective experience, or more precisely it is the ability to have (subjective) first person experiences. Beliefs are similarly "in the head of the believer". Whether either of these things will be measurable/detectable by an outside observer in the future is an open question.
Are those different experiences or different words for the same thing? What would it feel like to be self-aware without having first person experiences or vice versa?
Interesting questions. It seems to me that self awareness is a first person experience, so I am doubtful that you could have self awareness without the ability to have first person experiences. I don't think that they are different words for the same thing though - I suspect that there are first-person experiences other than self awareness. I don't see how my argument or yours depends on whether or not first-person experiences and self-awareness are the same; do you ask the questions for any particular reason, or did you just find them to be interesting questions?
Whether either of these things will be measurable/detectable by an outside observer in the future is an open question.
Suppose, as a thought experiment, that these things become measurable tomorrow. You said that beliefs are subjective. But how can a thing be both subjective and objectively measurable? Do beliefs stop being subjective the moment measurement becomes possible?
do you ask the questions for any particular reason
I ask them because I wanted you to play rationalist taboo (for "consciousness"), and I'm trying to decide if you succee...
(This post grew out of an old conversation with Wei Dai.)
Imagine a person sitting in a room, communicating with the outside world through a terminal. Further imagine that the person knows some secret fact (e.g. that the Moon landings were a hoax), but is absolutely committed to never revealing their knowledge of it in any way.
Can you, by observing the input-output behavior of the system, distinguish it from a person who doesn't know the secret, or knows some other secret instead?
Clearly the only reasonable answer is "no, not in general".
Now imagine a person in the same situation, claiming to possess some mental skill that's hard for you to verify (e.g. visualizing four-dimensional objects in their mind's eye). Can you, by observing the input-output behavior, distinguish it from someone who is lying about having the skill, but has a good grasp of four-dimensional math otherwise?
Again, clearly, the only reasonable answer is "not in general".
Now imagine a sealed box that behaves exactly like a human, dutifully saying things like "I'm conscious", "I experience red" and so on. Moreover, you know from trustworthy sources that the box was built by scanning a human brain, and then optimizing the resulting program to use less CPU and memory (preserving the same input-output behavior). Would you be willing to trust that the box is in fact conscious, and has the same internal experiences as the human brain it was created from?
A philosopher believing in computationalism would emphatically say yes. But considering the examples above, I would say I'm not sure! Not at all!