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Comment by vasilipupkin | Hacker News Reader

The way you are phrasing your disagreement with prevailing consensus is just semantics. Ok, let’s say animals are not 0% conscious, let’s say a certain animal is 24% conscious. It’s reasonable to say that, in comparison to a human, this animal is not conscious. Clearly, my cat exhibits some awareness of what’s going on, it’s not totally mindless. But to call it conscious in the way that we apply this term to humans is a stretch.

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So a human with a lesser IQ and EQ would be less conscious with that logic, hence worth much less and yet the concept of justice applies equally.

Intelligence is not consciousness. Consciousness is the thing that animates otherwise dead matter.

By that logic plants are conscious ? What about fungus ?

Do you believe that all humans possess equal amounts of consciousness?

Not even the same human possesses equal amounts of consciousness!

There are times when I am particularly conscious because I am concentrating, there are times when I am less conscious because I am in a flow state, and there are times when I am essentially not conscious because I am snoozing. I was also much more conscious when I was a child (because I was more frequently presented with novel experiences and had a focused awareness of them) and much less conscious now as an adult (because most of my experiences are familiar, so I autopilot more easily).

But I certainly would not consider these to be categorically different from each other (except possibly being in a sleep state). I am simply constantly shifting around on the consciousness scale.

I gather that there is no simple definition of concious, and it mostly is “same as humans”.

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