alt Hacker News> People have made due with conceptual fuzziness
Yes, but as noted elsewhere in this thread it's a matter of degree. Consciousness is such an ill-defined and overloaded word that it's hard to say it really means anything - it's more of an all-encompassing term for a bunch of largely subjective phenomena.
I don't disagree - for a long while I believed that the study of "consciousness" was the result of a linguistic mixup and best dealt w/ via Wittgenstein.
However, if you move past surface appearances, you can think about what kind of cultural "work" is being done spending effort on this mixup. What's happening is that, in the noosphere, the cloud of concepts around "consciousness" is battling it out with the cloud of concepts around "soul" over which cloud of concepts best describes what it means to be human, with big implications on what it means to be good person. Now we're dealing with a mix of Aquinas and Latour.