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Strange7 comments on Confused as to usefulness of 'consciousness' as a concept - LessWrong
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If I know how many grains of sand there are, their relative positions, and have a statistical profile of their individual sizes and shapes, I no longer need to know whether it counts as a "heap" or not. If I know an object's thermal mass, conductivity, and how many degrees it is above absolute zero, I don't need to know whether it's "warm" or "cold."
The term "consciousness" is a pointer to something important, but lacks precision. My understanding was that we were trying to come up with a more precise, quantifiable pointer to the same underlying important thing.
What is it that makes consciousness, or the thing that it points to (if such a thing is not ephemeral), important? You already said that knowing the exact quantities negates the need for categorization.
I am not in a position to speculate as to why consciousness, or the underlying referent thereto, is so widely considered important; I simply observe that it is. Similarly, I wouldn't feel qualified to say why a human life has value, but for policy purposes, somebody out there needs to figure out how many million dollars of value a statistical human life is equivalent to. Might as well poke at the math of that, maybe make it a little more rigorous and generalized.
Unless you're trying to decide whether its article on Wikipedia belongs in Category:Heaps ;-)