So I'm reading a book I find frustrating because it's trying to argue consciousness isn't in the brain because a lot of stuff your brain does is automatic and in a kind of dance with environmental queues. That seems to me like a sleight of hand, where you define consciousness to be something like "all human behavior" and note that it doesn't exist inside the head.
Personally, I'm in favor of defining consciousness pretty narrowly, and as lying on a spectrum.
@ZachWeinersmith I've spent most of my career in neuroscience and have found it best to just ignore consciousness. It's not a scientific concept, and any time I've seen people try to define it with rigour, it just ends up being something we already have a word for.
I see it like the tomato fruit/vegetable situation. Humans use them as a vegetable, and that is orthogonal to the fact that biologically they're a fruit. Consciousness is the vegetable of neuroscience.
Zach Weinersmith
Chris L. Barnes