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Comment by paulsutter | Hacker News Reader

Consciousness is a suitcase word, which makes it challenging to debate. From [1]:

"In The Emotion Machine, Marvin Minsky discusses suitcase words—words that contain a variety of meanings packed into them, such as conscience, emotions, consciousness, experience, thinking, morality, right, and wrong.

"The word ‘consciousness’ is used to describe a wide range of activities, such as “how we reason and make decisions, how we represent our intentions, and how we know what we’ve recently done [p128].” If we want to better understand the various meanings of consciousness we need to analyse each one separately, rather than treating it as a single concept.

[1] https://alexvermeer.com/unpacking-suitcase-words/

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> Consciousness is a suitcase word, which makes it challenging to debate.

It is worse: it carries with it connotations of discarded science, such as levels of consciousness (aka. "animals have a lower level, Buddhist monks a higher one"), and the mind-body separation — it is fairly clear by now that whatever could be called a mind is a part of our body.

There was a time where the majority belief was that emotions and diseases came from four types of humors running through our veins. Slowly, the consensus switched away towards miasma theory and then germ theory.

Words like humor, miasma, aether, have now fallen into disuse.

We are at that awkward period before another old word bites the dust.

I find that usually, people that are puzzled by consciousness only want to understand the relativity of points of view: "why am I me and not someone else? Why don't I wake up in a different body?" To which the answer is obviously that memories are located in your brain alone.

Have they? A rhetorical tone can be hard to convey over the aether, but humor me for a minute...

The point is that even after words (and whole concepts) fall out of favor scientifically, they can still have a metaphorical meaning. Sometimes it's the best we've got even though we know it's wrong. We might like to describe someone's personality in terms of serotonin levels and amygdala response, but we really don't know enough - so we call them hot-blooded, even though that theory died many a long age ago.

>If we want to better understand the various meanings of consciousness we need to analyse each one separately, rather than treating it as a single concept.

This implies the naive premise that consciousness the thing is not a suitcase itself (and thus, that an umbrella world is unsuitable to name it).

So, it basically presupposes the reductionism that it's supposed to prove.

The problem of a suitcase word is when different people are using different definitions to talk about the same concept. It is entirely reasonable to presuppose that that is nonsense. It has nothing to do with the complexity of the thing discussed. The problem is when there are disjoint definitions.

>The problem of a suitcase word is when different people are using different definitions to talk about the same concept. It is entirely reasonable to presuppose that that is nonsense.

Not really. People could be legitimately doing that, because the concept is inherently multi-faceted and each approaches it from a specific angle.

It's okay to approach things from different angles, and to use equivalent definitions even if they take wildly different shapes. But as my explanation continued, you cannot use disjoint definitions. If we are to talk about the concept of barnfulness, we won't have a productive discussion if one person defines it as 'red and square' and nothing more, while another person defines it as 'contains horses' and nothing more.

No concept inherently requires that definitions of it contradict. And highly-contradicting definitions is a critical factor in having a suitcase word.

This sounds similar to thought-terminating cliche.

I think the idea of umbrella words is thought-terminating itself.

Not at all, the goal is to negotiate specific meanings or alternatives for a conversation, so you know everyone is on the same page, as a foundation for a fruitful discussion with useful thought.

That's the most well-planned person I've ever seen. Thanks for the link, it'll definitely help me to put my stuff together.

Every word is a suitcase word.

Precisely.

Every word has emotional meaning alongside it. It's packed in via various ways: culture, history, happenings, social group. The bad part, is words unintended to carry bad emotional meaning can cause significant problems.

My words mean exactly what I wish them to mean.

I got the Alice reference, but not the point of the comment.

Obviously they don't, and it's not up to the one saying the words but to the listener too.

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