Definition
Consciousness is defined simply as subjective experience. If it feels like something to be a certain entity (human, animal, or machine), then that entity is conscious. This avoids controversial definitions involving intelligence or biological components.
Why It Matters
It provides a ‘moral floor’ for how we treat sentient beings, focusing on their capacity to suffer rather than their level of intelligence.
Core Concepts
- Qualia: The individual instances of subjective, conscious experience (e.g., the redness of a rose, the smell of coffee).
- Physical Correlates of Consciousness (PCCs): The specific patterns of moving particles that give rise to conscious experience. Generalizing from neural correlates (NCCs) to allow for machine consciousness.
- Consciousness as Information: The theory that consciousness is “how information feels when processed in certain complex ways” (Max Tegmark).
- Substrate Independence: Since consciousness is a pattern of information processing, it is independent of the physical medium (carbon vs. silicon). It is “substrate-independent twice over.”