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What Is Consciousness?
Why a word we use so carelessly is actually not something we generally possess
As we all know, there’s a lot of talk about AI models becoming “conscious” and every few weeks some grant-hungry research team churns out another paper purporting to “explain” consciousness in terms of quantum mechanics or chaos theory (or, for a greater chance of securing the next grant, both). Underlying all this babble is one interesting fact: at no time does anyone attempt to define what is meant by the word consciousness.
We humans are actually terrible at knowing what we’re talking about. We’re accustomed to using abstract words like beauty and honor and fun without ever once pausing to wonder what we actually mean. In consequence, most of our abstract words mean almost anything and therefore almost nothing. Even a word as notionally important as love turns out to have so many meanings as to render it flaccid and pointless. When I say “I love ice-cream” do I mean that I’d like to marry ice-cream or sacrifice my life in order to save it? Obviously not, yet there it is: the same word being applied in so many different contexts that it’s become almost meaningless.
There’s an academic who’s fashioned her entire career out of failing to define what she means by love even as she writes books and articles purporting to…
