This is a linkpost for Dissolving Confusion about Consciousness by Brian Tomasik, which was published in 2019, and last updated on 4 November 2017. Below is the summary. I fixed the last 2 links.
Summary
In order to reduce suffering, we need to determine which entities experience conscious emotions. This makes the problem of consciousness an issue not just of philosophical speculation but of practical importance, especially since most of the potentially conscious beings in the universe—animals, insects, digital agents, and more?—are not humans whom we can be fairly sure have subjective experience. However, the problem of consciousness is not a "hard" problem in the way that David Chalmers asserts. Consciousness is neither a thing which exists "out there" nor an ontologically fundamental property of matter; it's a definitional category into which we classify minds. "Is this digital mind really conscious?" is analogous to "Is a rock that people use to eat on really a table?" That consciousness is a cluster in thingspace rather than a concrete property of the world does not make reducing suffering less important. After all, even if consciousness were something concrete rather than conceptual, we would still have to choose to care about it.
A dialogue that further discusses some of these ideas and gives more airing to objections against reductionism is "My Confusions about the Hard Problem of Consciousness".
See also "A Simple Program to Illustrate the Hard Problem of Consciousness".
I've been chatting to Vasco via email about this. I guess I'll import some of my critiques here.
I feel like Brian's right that consciousness has some fuzzy edges (maybe it's a combination of many hard-to-recognise-in-isolation subphenomena), but his actual takes on this and most other philosophical subjects seem to me to reduce to an equivocation between nihilism and extreme egoism - they always seem to boil down to 'what "I" (the author) "care" about' as some kind of acceptance test. In the case of consciousness, this seems like you could understand it in a couple of ways, neither of which seem very informative to the reader:
Brian subsequently wrote the essay My Confusions about the Hard Problem of Consciousness, which I think (though Vasco disagrees) basically contradicts this one.
Though to do that I need to digress into an extended caveat that any purported contradiction comes with the caveat that on interpretation two, Brian's words and all words are referentless. At the very least, if we abandon the notion of consciousness, I think we most likely lose our entire vocabulary of non-physically-descriptive nouns, including but not limited to
(not to say I would miss all of these) (also heads up so it doesn't catch Vasco off guard, I added a couple of key ones since our email discussion)
And I think Vasco is arguing for interpretation two. So if so I think there's no discussion to be had - we are both just flapping our meat. It might turn out somehow that one of us counterfactually changes their behaviour if in range of the others' meat-flapping, but we can't ascribe that to causality - since that's a non-physically-descriptive noun - and we certainly can't ascribe it to anything like semantic properties of the words.
So I have to proceed by assuming that the first interpretation was correct, or that I somehow misunderstand the nature of the absence of consciousness, which is a strange position to be in. Perhaps Vasco can help me understand a different way of 'thinking about' it, but I am sceptical.
On this first-and-a-halfth interpretation Brian has gone from defining consciousness as 'thing Brian cares about' to 'we need to know what other things have raw feelings'. If the first essay were correct, 'need' wouldn't mean much, and if it did, the answer would be 'whatever things Brian cares about'. So perhaps Brian is saying there he anticipates caring about future things and cares about that anticipation. But learning information about the world couldn't give him information about other consciousnesses, because that information would be entirely contained within the stochastic process of him caring about things or not.
In the latter essay, Brian writes:
Which Vasco approves of. I think these claims are far too confident:
Ultimately I think that consciousness, despite being a philosophical black box and a neuroscientifically grey one, is too powerful a high level theory to abandon without a much more solid replacement. If you were to put me on a rack for long enough, I would recant the positions I'm arguing for here. But my prior explanation of why I would recant refers to a relatively simple, localisable statement that some -currently but not inevitably hard to specify - measurable quantity had gone negative, and that 'caused' my action.
I won't put words into Vasco's mouth, but I wonder whether he thinks there's a way of describing that process without using 'reference classes' that's simpler than '{full mathematical derivation that} that's the all the interacting fields and forces in that local area'.
I also want to ask Vasco how he can be confident that, even if it's true that he has no consciousness (and it does seem to be a contingent and disablable property in humans), that lack of a light would generalise to those of us who profess to have one.
Thanks for putting this together.
Relatedly, I liked Brian's post The Many Fallacies of Dualism.
What do you mean by "lose"? I think the vocabulary you listed is useful regardless of one's views about consciousness.
I am not sure I understand the question. Human behaviour can be described via natural language, or incomplete mathematical models.
I think awake humans (including me) are conscious based on Wikipedia's definition (and interpreting the words there as defined in the dictionary).