>You still owe me What drugs makes someone "awake and unconscious"?

This is an example of one but there are many others in the vein of date-rape drugs that have the effect I'm referencing. At the right dosage people can be awake yet very little to none of their experience during intoxication is stored into memory. That's essentially being unconscious and awake at the same time. Another example? Alcohol when people "black out" while drinking.

>C'mon man, I said consciousness is being awake. The obvious rebuttal is explaining how they're two different things. If you're just going to skip over the hard questions, you've already left the conversation even if you're still here.

I have a clearer idea of what it means to be awake and asleep than I do conscious and unconscious. I believe both are biomechanistically determined. Awake and asleep are actively adapting cyclical states regulated by the circadian rhythm (which I'll assume you're familiar with).

Consciousness seems to be an emergent property of episodic memory and linguistic (or perhaps symbolic?) activation thereof. We can talk ourselves into accessing our memories as well as talk ourselves into explaining them. I guess if I were to take a stab at a precise definition of consciousness, it is the act of using symbols (language and representation of language) to engage memory processes.

Unconscious is the state of a being capable of consciousness who is temporarily unable to do so.

Not conscious is the state of a being that lacks the ability to be conscious.

>Show me how your consciousness is fundamentally different than that of a cow.

We have episodic memory and symbolic language to access it, which emerges as consciousness. That would be my best answer to that question at this time.

>Consciousness is any system of active sensors feeding data to memory (of any sort) with any amount of intelligence that can/could act upon it. Remember that ants have some amount of intelligence. Amoeba hunt down their prey.

Depending on how intelligence is defined by that definition of consciousness all of the animal kingdom (and most of the other kingdoms of life) is conscious. As well as any self teaching AI.

>consciousness which really means "soul",

I don't think bringing up the concept of the soul is very productive in the conversation about consciousness (as i hinted at in my above comments).

>There's just consciousness that's the opposite of sleep.

How do you explain the phenomenon of lucid dreaming? It is true that current medical use of the terms conscious and unconscious do mean sleep and awake, it's not universally true in every medical context. It would be more accurate to say it means aware and unaware. You can be awake yet unconscious (there are drugs that prove this) and asleep yet conscious (just ask anyone who's suffers from sleep paralysis).

>There's just consciousness that's the opposite of sleep. It's a disagreement on the definition.

Correct me if I'm wrong here but you're defining consciousness as the opposite of asleep and asleep as the opposite of consciousness?.. Given that you're in a philosophy subreddit do you see why that is a poor answer for a definition? Assuming sleep is also a well defined phenomenon when it most certainly is not. Of course we have a practical definition of both what being awake is and what being asleep is that works very well in typical scenarios. But those definitions fall short when you ask what it means to be conscious. Normally I wouldn't care about it, and move on to something more interesting but the near potential of Turing Test passing AI has me pondering this question again. If can AI simulate a person requesting human rights, can simulate what a human response of being abused, can simulate being aware of its surroundings, can simulate episodic memory, can simulate being aware of being conscious and unconscious (powered on versus off), then is it not conscious and deserving of rights in which all conscious beings are? Or is human consciousness special? Or is our definition of consciousness incorrect?

>I dunno how to explain this to you

I can tell you're fun at parties... But seriously if you disrespect me again I'm leaving the conversation.

Could you provide me with a reasonable definition of consciousness that encompasses both real and imagined experiences, as well as their interpretations, while also being falsifiable?

Existentialism is important. Faith (non religious) is a necessity for moving forward when your heros die, your dreams are broken, and your truths are invalidated. Existentialism provides the dialogue to help one come to terms with a universe that doesn't provide one with true certainty.

>... It's a funny thing that humans necessarily act against reality, except that it still the reality of our existence and doesn't ever really contradict reality.... >

If determinism is true (which there is a very strong chance it is) how could one who believes in determinism ever judge someone as acting against it without assuming one has the choice to do so?

Proving or disproving consciousness is a near futile argument to attempt because we've yet clearly defined consciousness to begin with. Don't get me wrong. Proving or disproving consciousness is important, but so far the best answers are speculative interpretations of life experiences, and neuroscience. It's hard to accept consciousness doesn't exist when you think about your life (memories as you put it), and it is undeniable the ability to think can be altered quite predictably by affecting brain chemistry or matter (drugs, hormones, tumors, and other brain injuries). Neither of which proves nor disproves the existence of consciousness because the nature of it has no acceptable definition.

I think the conversation would be best progressed by taking the existence of consciousness as an axiomatic statement. Proving the existence of consciousness would then be irrelevant to describing what consciousness is and is not. I believe that is vastly more relevant and useful to current affairs regarding topics such as how to treat AI capable of passing the Turing Test.

Why would you assume we are distinct from the universe? All of what we are is just a fraction of it in every sense

Or it's a veiled attempt to put the figurative foot in the door for an argument that leads into a discussion about the soul. In my experience this is usually the case. By making distinct the biology of consciousness from the experience of consciousness it allows for arguments to speculate the nature of incorporal things. Eventually leading to arguments justifying a belief in the supernatural and eventually religion.