Yoav Ravid | v1.4.0Nov 20th 2021 | (+15/-15) | ||
J Thomas Moros | v1.3.0Oct 11th 2021 | (+5/-7) fix several typos | ||
Rob Bensinger | v1.2.0Dec 9th 2020 | (+25/-21) | ||
Rob Bensinger | v1.1.0Dec 9th 2020 | (+17157) |
How does this "having experiences" thing work, then? Well, this wiki page's authorseditors haven't agreed on an answer yet. As a cop-out, we instead provide a list of highlights from the history of other people thinking about this.
The word "consciousness" is used in a variety of different ways, and there are large disagreements about the reality and nature (and even coherence) of some of the things people profess to mean by "consciousness."
Colloquially, the word "conscious" is used to pick out a few different things:
Reasonably mainstream academic overviews of "consciousness" can be found in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy and the MIT Encyclopedia of the Cognitive Sciences.
This tag is tentatively and provisionally about the "having experiences" meaning(s) of "consciousness." For wakefulness and dreaming, see sleep. For knowledge, perception, and attention, see attention and cognitive science. And for reflective awareness and self-awareness, see identity, personal identity, and reflective reasoning.
This tag's focus is tentative and provisional because it is not altogether clear that "consciousness in the sense of having experiences" is a coherent idea, or one that's distinct from the other categories above. This tag is a practical tool for organizing discussion on a family of related topics, and isn't intended as a strong statement "this is the right way of carving nature at its joints."
Suffice to say that (as of December 8, 2020) enough LessWrongers find consciousness confusing...
The word
"consciousness""consciousness" is used in a variety of different ways, and there are large disagreements about the reality and nature (and even coherence) of some of the things people profess to mean by "consciousness."