What is your point?
Are you saying there is no point to having words for things that we don't fully understand?
Male hipsters too, btw.
Male hipsters too, btw.
What you shouldn't do is a have a word that people think is specific, when it's actually vague and and a hundred different people will give you a hundred different definitions.
It's like calling food 'organic'. You need to specify a definition before we can discuss anything meaningful about it. It doesn't have to be a perfect definition. You don't need to fully understand it. But you need to specify what you're talking about.
Articles grounded in science are a better fit.
A notion exists in a word form when it has some definition, even if it cannot be articulated well. Here by "definition" I mean something like "the ability to categorize examples even if fuzzily", i.e. saying that "a rock is not conscious while a human is" already indicates the existence of a definition. Note that this doesn't require that you be able to describe the category in a nice precise sentence.
Through dialogue, critique, experiments, we can gradually construct a specific sense for the word that a group of people can work on. Take "energy" for instance. The word existed before physicists defined it precisely, and even the definition within that domain evolved when quantum mechanics came around. Furthermore, the usage of the word isn't limited to contexts in physics only.
Is it worthless to ponder "what might a physics definition of consciousness be?".
But definitely utterly worthless to ponder "Is consciousness an illusion?" without knowing the definition of consciousness.
Here's a ludicrous question: "Is spirituality a fruit?" Whatever feeling you get when reading that phrase, it's the same feeling I get when reading the title of this article.
we have a shared understanding of consciousness which is separate from 'just' life (ie.apes are conscious but plants are not) but also separate from merely categorisation (ie.we think there are fundamental differences between conscious and not conscious). like when a syndrome becomes a disease.. we are looking for some thing we can point to and say this why we have this set of symptoms.
but this article is suggesting is that possibly there actually is no difference between conscious and not conscious, and that perhaps we are looking for the wrong thing. that is, they are suggesting that consciousness is not a thing, but an emergent illusion / experience.