>>13411128I find it useful to break the word “consciousness” into two separate concepts, so we can talk about it more precisely. The first concept is objective consciousness, which is measureable. Any organism that reacts to stimuli in its environment, whether a plant or insect or ameoba, can have objective consciousness. This says nothing whatsoever about the organism’s subjective experience.
The second concept, Subjective consciousness (qualia, emotions, etc.) is not something we can measure at all, consequently it’s very difficult to develop a useful scientific theory for it. You can’t even test whether somebody you’re talking to has an inner experience or they’re just an NPC (the solipsist problem).
We can develop a model that measures the information processing capabilities of an organism, and thereby determine how much “objective consciousness” it possesses. Whether this is correlated to the “subjective consciousness” of the organism is entirely unknown, and no scientific experiment has yet been conducted that can shed light on this.
While science can provide an objective measure of a bacteria’s information processing capabilities (which are far lesser than an actual nervous system, but still present), it tells us nothing about what it’s actually “like” to be a bacteria. People have traditionally turned to religion and philosophy for an understanding of subjective consciousness, since science can’t really explain it without undermining its own axioms
