[Lambdanaut]

Yes. The burden is proof is supposed to be on the person making a claim that breaks the known pattern.

We can think of consciousness in it's most simple terms as an experience of any number of bits of data.

If we are to accept that we ourselves have experiences, which we must lest we go down a fun pathway to madness (that I highly recommend for those excited by the prospect of existential crises), then there is no reason to accept that "lower" life forms do not also have experiences.

This chain of reasoning follows down, down, down, into what we may think to be simpler and simpler experiences of being. Down to the insects, and then the microbes.

There comes a point where whether something is alive or not becomes more about its ability to create cogent copies of itself, which certainly does not feel like a requirement of having an experience.

Beyond that lies the Earth, the wind, the rain, the basic elements our ancestors have respected and reverred for millenia in societies that did not invent the patriarchal dichotomy between subject and object that teaches us the unfounded "fact" that there are some things called "objects" which have no experience of reality, that we the "subjects" may control entirely.

Get deeper into intuitive practices, and one may have experiences of interacting with so called "objects" in ways that suggest a deep union between subject and object.

A union that precludes the separation our hectic monkey minds have been taught.

It is as if every particle of this universe is "alive" in its own writhing way, at different scales. All feeling the subtle vibrations of others.

The burden of proof is on those that say that consciousness "stops" at some point and the entity becomes an object, yet a mechanism has never been found.

The belief in fully unconscious objects, is then, faith based.

The "hard" problem of consciousness is only a problem when you want it to be.

[prettyStandard]

I believe in the beginning of A Brief History of Time by Stephen Hawkings, he mentions a similar problem where it's equally difficult to imagine a universe that always exists as a universe that was created by "something" that always existed.

I'm sure I'm butchering something about this interpretation in the decades since I've read it.

My point is this seems to be a similar problem where it's equally difficult to imagine that consciousness is something that arises from sufficiently complex systems, as it is to imagine its inherent to all systems.

I'm not saying you're wrong, I'm just saying I'm not certain you're right. I can see it either way.

[the_gipsy]

> We can think of consciousness in it's most simple terms as an experience of any number of bits of data.

If you interpret the word that way, it becomes completely uninteresting and, as you explore, makes us no different from some germ or collection of molecules.

[soco]

And is this such an issue? Does the world have to be a fancy lights show in order to be palatable? Isn't there enough wonder in the galaxies and the specks of dust, do we really to invent the almighty to make humans feel... special? because I guess that's what it all is, fragile egos can't take being anything less than The Chosen. Which explains also religious wars - this town is not big enough for two chosen.

[the_gipsy]

I just meant that "experiencing bits of data" is a meaningless description of human consciousness, not that human consciousness is a divine phenomenon.

[InSteady]

That's only true if the supremacy of your self and your conscious experience is the lens through which you find things interesting. It's also kind of reductive.

We are a collection of germs and molecules. We share a lot of commonalities with the units we are composed of. That doesn't make us "no different" than them, when taken as a whole. It certainly doesn't have to make us or the world uninteresting.

[uoaei]

Everyone who does serious work on consciousness defines it that way.

It's only naive, over-confident people jumping into conversations they don't understand who define it as something else.

We can also talk about cognitive abilities, sentience, etc., but these are distinct concepts from consciousness and it's extremely valuable to maintain that distinction if you want to have productive discussions.

[the_gipsy]

> Everyone who does serious work on consciousness defines it that way.

What? As "experiencing bits of data"? That's ridiculous, a stone experiences bits of data as scratches on its surface. You could say that it "experiences its environment", but that's semantics and has almost nothing to do with human consciousness - or at least with the interesting parts of it.

[uoaei]

Experience as phenomenological subjective experience. I.e., to experience "the color yellow" rather than just the physiochemical processes associated with incidence of photons of a particular wavelength, or "sour" rather than just interacting with certain kinds of acids.

Philosophy of mind scholars have been very consistent about this for the longest time. I would recommend reading some of the literature they have produced to become more acquainted.

However "interesting parts of human consciousness" as you put it are still outside the realm of consciousness per se, and can be more adequately described as "cognition", "awareness", "agency", "sentience", etc. Each concept is distinct (but related) from the others and it's unproductive at this point in our collective development of theory and study to lump them all under a single umbrella term.

Consciousness is a relatively boring question when limited to this definition, but that just means you need to change your language to remain comprehensible, not to redefine words that already have very precise meanings.

I can give you my personal thoughts on the matter, they may align more closely to yours than you may initially assume. As a quick note, complex systems are interesting primarily because they encode features of their environment in their physical makeup, kind of like your rock example. Rocks can't really "do" anything with that information except roll and crack differently than if they didn't have those scratches, but when you really drill down into this phenomenon, there's no bright line between the encoding of scratches on rock surfaces and slightly more complicated systems like river deltas changing the path of water in response to upstream flows (a kind of analog computer encoding the history of its "experiences") or even more complicated systems like lineages of organisms encoding their experiences in DNA via natural selection based on the history of its (the lineage -- not each individual organism) interaction with its 4D environment. None of this really has anything to say about what rocks or river deltas or organisms or whole lineages are experiencing according to the definition of consciousness above, and it seems impossible to access any kind of scientific evidence one way or the other, which is most of the reason that scholars (Chalmers) came up with the "hard problem of consciousness" to at least acknowledge and refine the difficult questions still facing us in this field of study.