What the heck is consciousness anyway?

[stevebowers]

As I stated in my reply to the above thread, I have a personal favorite definition of "consciousness," which I don't expect everyone else will agree with, but which I find especially compelling and I think really gets to the heart of what's actually interesting about this topic. This is the definition espoused by the philosopher Thomas Nagel in his 1974 essay "What Is It Like to Be a Bat?" , which has since been picked up and discussed at length by the neuroscientist/philosopher/author/podcaster Sam Harris.

The basic thesis of Nagel's paper is that the central mystery (and definition) of consciousness is the fact of subjective, first-person experience: as he puts it, "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." There is something it is like to be a person; there is presumably something it is like to be a bat, although it will necessarily be very different from what it's like to be a human; there is presumably not something it is like to be a rock. For us, and likely bats and other mammals, and probably most animals down to, perhaps, insects, "the lights are on" in a way that we generally do not assume to be the case for inanimate objects, or machines, or computers, although if one accepts the viability of Artificial General Intelligence one might assume a computer could have a similar subjective first-person experience if it was configured the right way.

Yeah, I've been thinking a lot about Nagel recently. In the OA Current era it is fairly commonplace for a human-derived sophont to choose to become something completely different, including a bat (usually but not always a sophont bat, or maybe something even more exotic like a To'ul'h). This implies that there must be procedures, processes and interpretation software available that can convert the mental experience of being a human into the experience of a bat, or a To'ul'h, or any of the other options available in the Terragen Sphere (and vice versa).

I expect that this would be easier if the original modosophont could upload themself, then modify their uploaded consciousness with effective neuro-translation software. The end result would be a human personality that is fully capable of experiencing bat or To'ul'h qualia, whatever that may be like.

It may even be possible to medically transplant a human brain directly into the body of a large animal of some kind, so that even staunch believers in CIT could gain the experience of being that animal (assuming suitable neurotranslation hardware could be manufactured). But there has to be room for a human brain in the host body to retain continuity. So CIT proponents could be implanted into an elephant, or a dolphin, or a whale, but not a mouse.