alt Hacker News> despite these contradiction, hasn't become marginal in the fashion of the aether or the theory of the flat earth. I think this because people indeed need it to bridge the biological world and the world of ethics and legality.
Sometimes the replies in these threads leave me wondering if p-zombies are real. It isn't that there are contradictions, it's that we literally do not know how to define the thing. And it has not fallen out of fashion because it is self evidently real - we all experience it.
We don't need it in order to bridge anything. Legality and ethics are largely game theory, however there are some aspects of both that only exist due to it. So it isn't some abstract concept used to bridge other concepts but rather a concrete thing that influences our way of doing things.
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People feigning inability to define "consciousness" is a social phenomenon, not a scientific miracle.
The reason is something akin to "stigma", where people refrain from attempting it because they fear the social repercussions.
Normally, you go about defining concepts by approaching it systematically. Capturing aspects of the phenomenon until you have exhausted them all.
Consciousness is to our universe as a video game player is to the in-game universe. Some games even call player connections "souls" or "minds" - a character belonging to a player who's lost connection may be "unconscious" or a "zombie".
Game characters, unless they've been made to break the fourth wall, have no idea what this means or why this happens.
I don't mean to imply our universe is a video game, since it would be games all the way up.