There is a famous definition of consciousness by Thomas Nagel which states that an organism is conscious if there is something that is like to be that organism. I‘ve always liked that definition even though it doesn‘t tell us how and why it emerges. But nobody knows that anyway.
The amazing thing for me about consciousness is that it seemingly emerges from the gray matter of the brain. From the outside there is nothing that would suggest such a thing yet it exists. We don‘t know when and how exactly it comes into existence but there seems to be a connection between the complexity of the neural network and the things it is capable of.
Then there is the argument that consciousness may not be reserved for human or animal brains but instead is a state emerging from a system of sufficient complexity. What if there a consciousnesses out there that operate on time scales beyond our means of recognition? This is a philosophical point of view but fascinating to think about.
The relevant reading material is "What is it like to be a bat"[0].
The way I understand it is that is asking you to imagine yourself as that type of being and try to identify whether it makes sense to you, such that if it does, then that object could be conscious. I (and many others) find it to be a really silly thought experiment, since it's testing your own power of imagination rather than anything interesting about the object.
I agree. Here is the quote from the Wikipedia article intro.
>Nagel famously asserts that "an organism has conscious mental states if and only if there is something that it is like to be that organism—something it is like for the organism."
I cannot figure out what the pronoun "it" is supposed to be refering to: the organism, or the something? Specifically the phase "it is like to be" does not grok for me.
The amazing thing for me about consciousness is that it seemingly emerges from the gray matter of the brain. From the outside there is nothing that would suggest such a thing yet it exists. We don‘t know when and how exactly it comes into existence but there seems to be a connection between the complexity of the neural network and the things it is capable of.
Then there is the argument that consciousness may not be reserved for human or animal brains but instead is a state emerging from a system of sufficient complexity. What if there a consciousnesses out there that operate on time scales beyond our means of recognition? This is a philosophical point of view but fascinating to think about.