>We make that assumption because other people are like us.
Yes, and I think this is a mistake, because it shuts down any hope of isolating what it is about us that makes us conscious. Perhaps this will change as human-lookalike-robot technology gets better, breaking down the "looks like me, must be conscious like me" argument.
People are starting to grant animals the rights of consciousness, but let me ask, what about sperm? I myself was sperm once, and over time I became a full-grown human being. If consciousness is a boolean, then at what exact moment did I become conscious? Was it when I reached the egg? When the first neuron in my brain formed? When my umbilical cord was severed? When I first recognized myself in a mirror [Lacan]?
> If consciousness is a boolean, then at what exact moment did I become conscious?
There's a simpler answer: there was never a state in which you were not conscious. And yes, that would apply to literally everything in the universe, and in every grouping of such things imaginable, and in fact 'you' are neither a single entity, nor a gestalt of several, nor merely a component of another, 'you' are all these things at once.
But the real point I'm trying to make here is that these questions are literally meaningless if you insist upon empiricism because they are untestable.
Yes, and I think this is a mistake, because it shuts down any hope of isolating what it is about us that makes us conscious. Perhaps this will change as human-lookalike-robot technology gets better, breaking down the "looks like me, must be conscious like me" argument.
People are starting to grant animals the rights of consciousness, but let me ask, what about sperm? I myself was sperm once, and over time I became a full-grown human being. If consciousness is a boolean, then at what exact moment did I become conscious? Was it when I reached the egg? When the first neuron in my brain formed? When my umbilical cord was severed? When I first recognized myself in a mirror [Lacan]?