Consciousness

My own definition of consciousness is that it's distinct from emotions (and emotions are just labels for self-preservation instincts). Emotions (or their underlying instincts) are seen to varying extents in pretty much any life form. Consciousness (to me) seems to be the ability to intentionally override those emotions with behaviour that's not exactly (or maybe directly, in the short term cause-effect sense) self-preserving.

I would say consciousness is a social construct as opposed to a biological construct.

Has anyone else stated this? What are the flaws of this definition?

I am not a fan of human exceptionalism, but I feel consciousness is so loosely defined that we seem to be shifting the goalposts as our understanding of "intelligence" (specifically artificial intelligence) improves and we try to shy away from labeling artificial intelligence as conscious.

Right now, no (as far as I'm aware) artificial intelligence is in any way charged with its own self-preservation. They exist in a vacuum. Artificially intelligent constructs cannot observe each other and make decisions based on the existence or flourishing of each other. Without the risk of non-existence or diminished existence, they remain mere algorithms producing a quasi-deterministic output for a given input. They might be more complex to understand (and opaque) than the algorithms of the past but they are still nowhere near the level of existence of even the most primitive life-forms for this reason.

ps: inspired by Neil & Anil Seth Discuss Consciousness in the Universe

RTFM

Last night, I tossed away the box a heated blanket came in, as the 3 year warranty (boldly marked on the box) had ended. Before I tossed the box away, I found a crumpled manual at the bottom. Turns out I've been using the blanket the wrong way up for all of 3 years, presumably heating the mattress instead of heating myself!

nothing's working

I'm no stranger to encountering broken things - in fact I might go so far to say I occasionally seek them out! Fixing stuff (and enjoying fixing stuff) is an innate part of who I am and what I do. There are some things that I don't enjoy fixing though. Things that are supposed to just work.

Number one on that list is myself. My own body and mind.

It's not like I don't enjoy fixing myself (although I must say that as the years go by, I have come to terms with accepting that I do need increasing levels of assistance and professional opinions when it comes to fixing myself), but that when the list of things (subsystems?) that are not functioning to expectation become overwhelming, life just feels like one series of setbacks.

I look around me and I see things that I am struggling to take care of because I cannot take care of myself. I know what is supposed to fix me (theoretically, of course - nothing to do with human beings can be guaranteed!) but it's not just a matter of knowing, or even doing, but doing in a way that makes sense.

Case in point: sleep. My sleep troubles (and, case in point, I didn't regard them as troubles until quite recently) were from as long ago as my late teens, and it was only 2 weeks ago that I was able to experimentally prove that they were the cause of a host of other problems!

And yet, here I am, blogging at 1:59 am when I definitely am supposed to be asleep.

Was it because I woke up too late? Was it because of my cup of tea at 10pm? Was it because of my late dinner at 11pm? Was it a combination of all of these + my overall predilection for staying up late and doing increasingly unproductive things, at the cost of productive things that could be better done in the day, because I have less autonomy over what I can and cannot do during the day? It's hard to say. But here I am.