Three questions I would like to find some answers for are:

• What is known (to a high degree of certitude) about consciousness?

• What experimental tests have been able to verify predictions made?

• What predictions have been made that nobody has managed to test yet, but could, have an experimental proof or disproof?

Does anyone know some good sources which do cover any of these? Also it would be great to hear less-wrongers own input to these questions!

Do you believe in consciousness?

If you do what exactly would you define it as?

and what evidence do you have for its existence?

Many rational people are atheists, one does not believe in God for the same reason one does not believe that there is an invisible dragon in my garage. Normally the definition of God would be so vaguely specified that each time you refute it, the bubble pops up elsewhere. Alternatively it may be a triviality, as the definition due to Spinoza.

In Buddhism and Erwin Schrodinger's essay "What is Life?" there is a notion of consciousness - roughly defined as an indivisible subjective experience - some philosophers have even put a currency on it: "qualia". Schrodinger argues that as a consequence of the statistico-determinstic nature of matter as well as the personal experience of directing ones own actions - that one is equal to "omnipresent all-comprehending eternal".

The Church-Turing thesis helps us clarify the situation a little, if we accept it (and we are right to do so, given the current understanding of computation and physics) we must either decide that living beings have some para-physical ability to experience or that there exists some algorithm which (when suitably implemented) becomes conscious. Since the former notion of a para-physical ability is absurd we discharge that.

The algorithm takes as input some stream of bits - we can assume it is also a computable process, call it the environment - processes them and outputs some signals to the environment. Since the concatenation of two computable processes is another computable process we can consider these two processes as one. In summary, we have reduced existence of consciousness to the existence of a computable process which takes no input and no output - and just is "conscious".

There just remains one detail: There is, necessarily, absolutely no way to determine - given an algorithm - whether it is conscious or not. It is not even a formally undecidable statement! Since we have reduced consciousness to a question about Turing machines - and consciousness refuses to be phrased formally (it is subjective, and computation is objective). The notion of consciousness is hence "not even wrong".