When observed by a different conscious being, yes. But from the inside observed by oneself, it feels quite similar, besides the fact that sleep is initiated by oneself, and the wakeful state transition for sleep is more gradual than for anesthesia.

I think that distinction matters because strictly speaking, oneself only has access to one's own consciousness, and that defines one's own understanding of the word "consciousness". It's not possible for me to be you after all, and whatever inferences I make about other people being conscious is based on the fact that I experience my consciousness, and you are similar to me in some specific way (such as being, presumably, a human), therefore you must be conscious. Of course, I'm taking a materialist stance here but that's what's practical to talk about anyway.

I had some serious surgery a few years ago and paid attention when I went under to see if I could recall anything.

Nope. You don’t exist for that time. Anesthesiologist counts down 10, 9, 8, 7, and then I was teleported to the recovery bed.

I consider it incredibly weird and very unlike sleep. Consciousness is off, instantly, then back.

I'm thinking out loud and pointing out the difference to avoid confusion, and also trying to invite discussion around the colloquial def, because I think the colloquial def is the most important/useful one.

It feels very different to me. I have a dream perhaps once a year, and it's nowhere near as vivid as real experiences. Dreams don't have much color, shape, or audio, just a blurry mess where I could barely make out things resembling objects or people. There is no way to mistake that with reality.

The conclusion linguists are coming to is much stronger than that. The data indicate that the last common ancestor of languages as varied as Hittite, German, and Latin was spoken around 4500 BCE in Ukraine. It's a linguistic equivalent of a genetic bottleneck. It isn't merely that we can't know what happened before that. It's that the proto language was in fact relatively recent.

I'd distinguish verbal inner monologue from consciousness. Many people think on the daily without narrating things to themselves in sentences, without feeling brutish or animalistic. I can plan complex human actions including theory of mind considerations without narrating it as a monologue. It's still very conscious.

Also that reddit post seems like a fake story made up by a teenager as a sort of scifi. It's just too on the nose. Yeah he lived life without understanding that his friends still exist while out of sight... I guess the OP just learned about some developmental stages of toddlers or object permanence etc and wrote a story like this as fanfic.

It is an interesting book, but as far as I know no one has verified Everett's work. I've just noticed this article that talks about it: https://news.mit.edu/2016/data-amazonian-piraha-language-deb...

Turns out that isn't exactly true. You can poly concepts from genetic drift to language and infer what they must have been like. It's revolutionized the field of linguistics.

That is what discredits the idea in my view. Illiterate people are not conscious? People in hunter gatherer or isolated subsistence farming communities?

A great majority of humanity remained illiterate just a few generations ago. It's absurd to posit they weren't conscious.

Hunter-gatherer and nomadic lifestyles are complex and require deep thought and planning and coordination. You can't do it purely reactively or carrying out simple scripts.

Its not so clear to me if it's the chicken or egg. So many things are good candidates for the key ingredient.

I personally think that consciousness is social theory of mind applied to the self, or something like simulating and being concerned with how the tribe sees you and interprets your intentions etc, forcing you to analyze yourself similarly to how you analyze others. This would mean that solitary animals are less conscious than social ones.

Probably the most fascinating idea there is right now in the field.

It might be right.

My intuition is that it’s not right - that you can have experience without language, images, and other “sensory objects” but I wonder how useful it is.

Just like a plasmic euphoria detached from any identity or process; or an endless, mindless, dread, that drones on for billions of years in the vacuum of space waiting to be liberated by sound, light, anything

If by "consciousness" you mean the thing that goes away when we sleep, how are you so sure that there's not a conscious thinker in the machine? That seems like a hypothesis rather than a proven fact as we don't know what process in the brain is responsible for consciousness fading away (assuming a practical materialist stance here) when we sleep. If it's some very basic informational pattern thing, then computers could have it.

What a nice question.

There won't be a simple answer, but if the model=actor due to survival pressures theory stands, it must be clearly testable.

I would go about answering that question as follows, identify the smartest creatures, whose cognition is most alien to ours, whose behavior suggests they have a strong real-time sense of self that extends into it immediate processing, regardless of immediate action, or immediate action dependent on immediate state that is not easily explained as normally detectable or processed lower order state.

Humans obviously.

Then the octopus, a true alien cognition. it has an extremely curious and creative mind, and can behave quite differently in even slightly different situations, as well as coherently is situations that ought to be well out of its niche in nature range.

Parrots are very distantly related. And are another example of very versatile social minds, who can pick up nuance, are lifelong learners.

The jumping spider had and extremely distant lineage, relative to people. But is a highly counterintuitively intelligent creature for its size. It is clear than when presented with a problem, it doesn't just search for a solution, but ruminates, and often finds non-monotonic, non-linear and very indirect means. And once it sets on a plan it carries it out adeptly. Even its smallest movement betray very nuanced understanding of physical dynamics. And it appears to be able to form "social" bonds with people it is familiar with. Those may be produced by simple strategies, or they may not.

Clearly rats are high intelligent. Closer to us, but no as close as many other intelligent mammals.

Whales come to mind. Although the logistic defy imagination.

What all these creatures also have, is a high ability to tackle novel problems individually. Sometimes also together.

Then a biologists approach might be creating various experiments, with and without brain scanning, to attempt to identify any externally or internally functional differences under conditions designed to require self-modelling and/or self-control at high level to occur.

That is just a thought on a start. And would only be a beginning.

The big questions, is a creatures ability to function, highly related to its ability to detect and therefore respond to its highest level states. And is that a very fast, essentially realtime, level of awareness and control, awareness and control, outside of a larger longer external loop.

Then can experiments be set up, that would create what might appear to be a cognitive threat to a creature? Does the creature treat managing internal states as important as managing external states? Is it able to do that at all? Does it go further and prioritize them/

Yeah me too, and it feels like a lot of people who are exclusively 'stuck' in language seem to think the pre-language part is somehow inferior (which imo is very misguided)

No. There are people who cannot exist without the internal monologue, and if unusual circumstances interrupt that internal monologue they experience anxiety, dysfunction, and a rapidly intensifying irritation that they can't even articulate (because there's no monologue to allow them to describe it). They're generally very stupid, but the internal monologue tells them that they should have a high opinion of their own intelligence. It's unclear to me if they can even pretend to understand the concept of metacognition.

There is also a growing group of redditoids who believe that if you don't have an internal monologue you "have no soul".