Lorraine Ford
It is not entirely true, what David Chalmers said about consciousness, back in 2016. He said:
- We can’t define consciousness
- We can’t measure consciousness
- We can’t explain consciousness (i.e. the subjective experience, “the hard problem”)
- We don’t know what consciousness does, we don’t know the function of consciousness
- We can’t ignore consciousness
What he said is not entirely true, because we CAN define consciousness (1 above), we CAN explain consciousness (3 above), and we CAN know what consciousness does (4 above), in the very same way that we define, explain and know the low-level energy, momentum, and position categories that exist in the world.
How one defines, explains and knows energy, momentum and position is: we use special symbols to represent these categories, and we use other special symbols to represent the relationships between these categories and the other low-level categories in the world.
These symbolic statements, that represent the energy, momentum and position categories, are not the actual “living” real-world categories; these symbolic statements merely REPRESENT the low-level real world on paper or screen.
Similarly, we can symbolically represent low-level consciousness, seen as the necessary-to-a-viable-system, on-the-spot, time-place, point-of-view aspect of the world, as something like (e.g.):
(position=number1) AND (momentum=number2) IS TRUE.
The above statement is how one would represent low-level, on-the-spot, time-place, point-of-view information about the world. As has been shown by computer programs and computer systems, this is the type of collated "TRUE" information about a system that is necessary in order for a viable moving system to exist.
Of course, it is true that we can never measure consciousness (2 above) because, while low-level position and momentum are aspects of the world that can potentially be measured, a low-level aspect of the world representable as “(position=number1) AND (momentum=number2) IS TRUE” is not a thing that can be measured.
This is irrespective of whether low-level position and momentum can simultaneously be measured, or whether low-level position and momentum simultaneously exist: what CAN'T be measured is something representable by a statement containing the symbols "AND" and "IS TRUE". The symbols "AND" and "IS TRUE" in a statement symbolise time-place, on-the-spot point-of-view, collated, consciousness aspects of the world.