[jrv]

I think the best argument for that might be that some people don't seem to understand what "consciousness" (in the sense that you are talking about) even means, and how it's different from something that can be explained as an emergent phenomenon of known physics. I then sometimes wonder whether those people are not actually conscious, or whether they just don't get it.

[monktastic1]

Indeed. Nagel famously clarified that "an organism has conscious mental states if and only if there is something that it is like to be that organism." Many found this enlightening. I find it extremely perplexing that this wasn't immediately obvious to everyone. On the other hand, in Tibetan Buddhism there is something called a "pointing-out instruction," where your enlightened nature is pointed out to you. Afterward, you wonder how you could have ever missed it. Perhaps I should treat Nagel's paper as analogous. Like "oh, duh, the lights are on. Thanks for the reminder."

[kelseyfrog]

Maybe, but the vast majority of people act, whether they intend to or not, as if consciousness is a social fact. The discrepancy between social facts (especially if they have a plurality of groundings),l and the existence of a scientific fact is fundamentally an interesting phenomenon.