Yeah but that’s exactly what I mean when I say that defining consciousness as a scale brings us no closer to the (poorly defined) questions we have about these things. We don’t even know if we should define it as a one-dimensional number.
“When is something conscious?”
“Well it’s a scale so once it has a high enough consciousness number”
“Okay, so at what point in the scale do we consider it conscious?”
“Well that depends on how you want to define ‘conscious’”
So you get stuck with essentially the same question. And I think that expressing it as a scale also runs into the problem of “how do you measure it then?” which basically requires answering the original consciousness-question again.
Yeah but that’s exactly what I mean when I say that defining consciousness as a scale brings us no closer to the (poorly defined) questions we have about these things. We don’t even know if we should define it as a one-dimensional number.
“When is something conscious?”
“Well it’s a scale so once it has a high enough consciousness number”
“Okay, so at what point in the scale do we consider it conscious?”
“Well that depends on how you want to define ‘conscious’”
So you get stuck with essentially the same question. And I think that expressing it as a scale also runs into the problem of “how do you measure it then?” which basically requires answering the original consciousness-question again.