I will always be intrigued by the fact that you had time/energy/willingess to explain all that, rather than simply formulating your question in a clear and direct way
That shouldn't be a mystery to you if you had read and understood what I wrote to you, especially if you also read what I wrote to Dan.
You should know by now why I am unwilling to repeat myself to you beyond a limit, and you should also know why I wrote the post that I did, which apparently had no meaning for you as you didn't acknowledge reading or understanding it beyond realizing that it wasn't me repeating previously posted words as you keep requesting.
Sorry, Leroy. I would like to invite you in and share ideas with you, but that has been impossible, and I don't expect that to change.
So why would I write those words fully expecting that they would have no impact on you? I've also already answered that more than once, but I would be surprised if you could tell me what that answer was. That's the problem here, and an insurmountable one so far.
That answer again for the benefit of those who haven't been following: There are other readers here who can and who I hope do benefit from reading a post.
Broadly speaking, we can divide RF members into those with adequate reading comprehension and intellectual discipline who can focus on, understand, and critically assess an argument, and if they find it compelling, will have their belief set modified by the experience.
The second group is the set of RF readers for whom the words just bounce of them as if one were writing to them in a foreign language.
The first group are people who can teach and learn, and they are the reason for writing expository text. If we use the metaphor of a university course, that is the lecture section.
The second group can do neither, but we can learn from by observing them and generating a set of data points that can be arranged along a spectrum and assigned a relative frequency according to how much they resemble one another and how much and in what ways they vary. We can call this the lab section.
Science doesn't even have a definition for "consciousness"
That's incorrect.
Neither science nor philosophy have a precise and comprehensive definition of consciousness that captures all of its nuances, but as
@metis wrote, consciousness is awareness. It is self-evident in a fully conscious human mind, which includes self-awareness.
Its existence in other heads cannot be experienced directly but rather is somewhat problematically inferred from what appears to be purposive behavior involving an organism's interactions with its surrounding.
There appears to be levels of consciousness across the animal kingdom and levels of consciousness within individuals as they become more or less wakeful.
The content of consciousness are called qualia, and in man includes a few different kinds of awareness, such as self-other awareness, sensory perceptions of one's body and surroundings, emotions, desires, experiences like familiarity and attraction/repulsion, and symbolic thought (words). It's much harder to say how much of that goes on in a bird's or a worm's or an ant's head. Certainly not thought in words. Most of that ought to be in a dog's head, but probably little or none in a worm's or ant's. A bird ought to be intermediate in terms of the variety and complexity of its qualia.
Do you investigate these questions using search engines or AI that answers queries rather than just paraphrasing your words like Copilot here on RF? With a search engine like Google, you'll need to choose your inquiry parameters well, open and review the hits, then curate and organize the salient points into a coherent summary. Google is now submitting enquiries to AI automatically. All one need do is choose the search parameters. The following is a truncated response. More followed what is shown here:
