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Comment by tgv | Hacker News Reader

By what possible commonly agreed upon definition could consciousness be equal to experience? The only result of accepting that definition would be having to invent a new name for what I (and I believe many with me) call consciousness, as badly defined as it is.

To put it in the words of Syndrome: if everything is conscious, nothing is.

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> By what possible commonly agreed upon definition could consciousness be equal to experience?

I'll turn the question around: What aspect of your consciousness is not an experience? What aspect of your experience is not a part of consciousness?

I don't have an issue with experience being a necessary part of consciousness. My problem is that it doesn't seem to be sufficient, by a long shot.

This seems like another one of those debates where there's a spectrum and a bunch of people disagree about where on that spectrum it's okay to use a certain word.

> To put it in the words of Syndrome: if everything is conscious, nothing is.

I think what you're using as a counter argument is really a foundation of buddhist emptiness or vedanta brahman. i.e. that the percieved duality is an illusion

You're reading too much in my words, but I don't agree, I think: if it's perceived as X, there is something in it that makes it stand out as X. It may not be exactly what we think it is, but it does exist.

Metacognition may be a better term to differentiate from the lazy use of consciousness.

IMO, that's just relabeling, and in a strict sense only part of what I consider consciousness. E.g., self-awareness is not implied by meta-cognition.

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