Do you consider an infant to be conscious?
Or electrons?
Or electrons?
This is well documented fact, in the medical and cognitive science fields: humans consciousness fade away as their neurons are reduced/malformed/misfunctioning.
You can trivially demonstrate it in any healthy individual using oxygen starvation.
There's no one neuron that results in any definition of human consciousness, which requires that it's a continuum.
I haven't publicly stated this before now: Consciousness requires the ability to perceive PAIN.
All human learning is based upon the single kernel of pain (vs pleasure).
A newborn is hungry or cold and cried. It learned to cry. It learned to smile. Eventually, delayed gratification lead to less pain (more pleasure).
The rest is human history.
As our brains mature, we learn how to predict our environments in ways to maximize pleasure, and avoid pain (grossly oversimplified). We learn more about others, what works, and what doesn't.
An AI also learns from feedback, but is it ever perceiving anything?
I think the jist of the article is that we will use whatever definition of consciousness is useful to us, for any given use case
Much the same way treat pigs vs dogs, based on how hungry or cute we feel.
Electrons make no sense as a question unless I'm missing something.
Do the physical quanta we call electrons experience the phenomenon we poorly define but generally call consciousness?
If you believe consciousness is a result of material processes: Is the thermodynamic behavior of an electron, as a process, sufficient to bestow consciousness in part or in whole?
If you believe it is immaterial: What is the minimum “thing” that consciousness binds to, and is that threshold above or below the electron? This admittedly asks for some account of the “above/below” ordering, but assume the person answering is responsible for providing that explanation.
But, my mind never leaves my skull so it's definitely bound to my brain and nothing else (ignoring electrical fields).
We can imagine what it's like to be other things, but we can never be sure (and almost certainly would not accurately match reality). Our imagination is bound to our senses, so it's limited. I can't even be sure that the color red that comes to my mind is the same color you see in your mind. As long as our imaginations paint the same color every time red is perceived: we'd be none the wiser and would go on thinkong we see the same thing. And also consider animals that can perceive colors and sounds beyond human range. Does this say anything more about consciousness?
An electron almost certainly is not thinking or aware, but does it perceive? Does a thermostat on a wall perceive temperature? Do AIs perceive anything?
Is perception even useful to think about when trying to define consciousness?
I'm rambling off topic... going back to your points: if something is sufficiently intelligent to understand the workings of a thing: does this automatically place the understood thing in a lower consciousness?
Could a diety, or a force of nature have a higher consciousness than us? Or are we above the force, in terms of consciousness? It doesn't even seem useful to make these comparisons....
When we blow air, the motion of air particles may be studied in a mechanical way, and some intelligent microbes, if such exist, would come to a naive theory of air motion, as they are oblivious to what brings that air into motion. It's understandable, because many generations of those microbes change while we exhale just once. Similarly, what we perceive as magnetism or even the time itself might be some incomprehensible formless lifeform, and it would see us as simple and predictable microbes.