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Comment by jampekka | Hacker News Reader

The article doesn't claim anything about what is and what is not conscious. It's about what we may think is conscious, and why.

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It claims that there is no objective fact about whether something is conscious. From the second paragraph:

>Consciousness is, in other words, a model or a belief, not an inherent property. It is a belief about what kinds of entities have beliefs, experiences, feelings, intentions and agency.

Unless I'm misunderstanding you, the existence of an objective "consciousness" property is a hotly debated question philosophically. Many great thinkers have written and discussed this question at length, and as of now the jury is very much out.

Sure, but staking a claim in that debate is taking a position on what is and isn't conscious.

I read "consciousness" in there meaning attribution of consciousness, not as an ontological claim about what is conscious. The article seems to use this switching of the definition as a bit of a rhetorical device, which does muddy the point.

But there isn't? What does it factually mean to be conscious? How can we claim other living beings aren't are conscious?

We don't know yet because we don't have a fundamental theory of consciousness. My money is on that it's an objective property of the structure of computation happening in the brain.

Consciousness can factually exist even though another being’s subjective experience is not directly observable. we can measure its behavioral and neural correlates and infer consciousness from them but we cannot directly observe the experience itself or conclusively prove its absence in another being. I don't think we'll ever get to a point where subjective experience in another is directly observable. But I don't think we need that to happen to prove consciousness factually exists.

That a thing is /red/ is directly observable (by people with good eyesight etc) but what the OP was ineptly driving at presumably holds of redness.

Correlates to what exactly? To behavior or processes we assume subjective experience is present in?

The two quoted sentences are inept but in the way ‘red is an idea in us not an inherent property of things; red is a sensation of things etc etc’ is inept. There are a million better formulations that will fall short of writing red into the laws of physics.

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