I think people focus a lot on the dangers of erasing consciousness as a moral entity, but it strikes me that something which is so loosely defined and for all intents and purposes unfalsifiable carries its own dangers too. Especially given so many of us are happy to kill and eat many creatures that pass many proposed tests of consciousness.

It's probably sensible to use more strongly defined terms like humanity, self-awareness, cognitive capability, empathy and so on. And to treat them somewhat separately rather than trying to bundle it all together.

But people want there to be something special about us which can be defined as something separate from us, in a neutral, universalist sounding way which also happens to be relatively exclusive - I think because there's this desire to make the concept of a soul have an equivalent in scientific realism for the purposes of discussing philosophy in a secular way.

I agree about definition confusion. I like to define consciousness as "capability to suffer".

Can cow/dog/spider suffer? - very important question, even if not answerable.

It certainly doesn't seem like consciousness exists. Although to disprove that hypothesis all we need is to find a single counter-example, which coincidentally all of us can provide via our personal experience of self.

It would be fine for an unconsciouss intelligence to maintain that hypothesis lacking any evidence to the contrary, but for us it seems we are just all gaslighting ourselves to ignore the one counter example we all have.

It’s possible that you’re not conscious. So your subjective view may be correct for you. To those who are conscious, this argument doesn’t really matter, and the proof is simply in the pudding.

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