What is Consciousness?

Apologies for the long-winded highbrow response, but I did really like this podcast episode on consciousness from 80,000 Hours (and I listen to very few of their episodes). They discuss:

• Why is there so little consensus among philosophers about so many key questions?
• Can free will exist, even in a deterministic universe?
• Might we be living in a simulation? Why is this worth talking about?
• The hard problem of consciousness
• Materialism, functionalism, idealism, illusionism, panpsychism, and other views about the nature of consciousness
• The story of ‘integrated information theory’
• What philosophers think of eating meat
• Should we worry about AI becoming conscious, and therefore worthy of moral concern?
• Should we expect to get to conscious AI well before we get human-level artificial general intelligence?
• Could minds uploaded to a computer be conscious?
• If you uploaded your mind, would that mind be ‘you’?
• Why did Dave [the interviewee] start thinking about the ‘singularity’?
• Careers in academia
• And whether a sense of humour is useful for research.

I think the wakefulness/self-awareness distinction and the question of whether we can slow down time are important from an ethical perspective (I think people often dismiss something as not capable of experiencing pain/happiness just because it doesn't appear to be self-aware and presumably if things are in some sense "perceiving things more slowly and stretching out their existence" then those experiences should count for more).

The creative process consists of a singularity consciousness (1) in a universe of nothingness (0) vibrating and creating everything you imagine exists. 1001100 vibrating energy What you hear and say decibels What you see angstroms What you think consciousness All are just a creation and expression of vibrating energy There is nothing physical Atoms are electrons protons neutrons Those are leptons quarks bosons This are actually subatomic electromagnetic energy waves NOT PARTICLES I THINK THEREFORE “I AM Tell them I AM has sent you. The Creator is our collective consciousness PURPOSE: To make our existence as a BORED LONELY SINGULARITY CONSCIOUSNESS (1) IN A UNIVERSE OF nothingness (0) a more enjoyable experience.