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Comment by dgoodell | Hacker News Reader

Why is it so hard for people to understand that you can’t have productive discussions about things that you haven’t solidly defined?

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That is a real problem though. Many things you cannot define because their bounds are indefinite. To define those things requires knowing the bounds. It's much simpler to accept our limitations in language and cognition because it removes those artifical boundaries when connecting physics to metaphysics. We only need to describe things when they matter.

Then there are things you can very solidly define but never know what they are. We can describe physics, and their applications, but when connecting metaphysical effects down to the constituent quantum processes the whole is unknown. We aren't sensible enough.

The truly wholesome perspective is from outside the universe.

What I like to ask about consciousness is to identify the step in the chain of organisms or matters where we jump from not having consciousness to having one.

Why is it so hard for people who hold this view to see that there is a bootstrap problem for any knowledge beyond personal experience if this were true? The reality is that definitions are works-in-progress, and getting started often involves a 'definition' that is little more than a placeholder for an eventual explanation of something currently unexplainable.

We know what consciousness is. It's our self-awareness.

We don't know where it comes from our how to test it, because each individual can only observe their own consciousness.

All we know is that we have it because its not about what the word means. It's about how we apply the category of "conscious" to things. It's a way of either distancing or bringing ourselves closer to things.

We might as well just ask "Is the universe like us?"

> We know what consciousness is. It's our self-awareness

Not really. There are plenty of disorders that destroy a person’s self-awareness but appear to leave a fully conscious person there anyway.

Then take off the “self” part.

How about conscious is awareness? The more aware you are, the more conscious you are?

Is 1000 bees more or less aware than 10 buffalo?

I believe you are right to say that consciousness is generally regarded as more than self-awareness, but unless you want to regard self-awareness as specifically not a form of consciousness, then the consciousness of the people with the disorder you refer to are missing something - something that I believe was of great importance in the evolution of the human mind.

Yeah, my understanding is that it's highly undesirable to have no sense of self-awareness.

human history is filled with examples of important discoveries based on productive discussions about things we haven't solidly defined. I have found that the further I stay from those areas, the happier I am.

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