professorkevin.com
§ 0 · INTRODUCTION
Assistant Professor of Management Information Systems, UNC Wilmington. I study what technology does to your sense of who you are. I used claude.ai to generate most of this Web site.
§ 1 · THREE DEFINITIONS OF CONSCIOUSNESS
So many news stories about AI "consciousness" these days... They never cover what consciousness really is, though, and so they are mostly nonsense. I asked Anthropic's Fable 5 model to find three popular definitions of consciousness and then to write minimal JavaScript that would make this page conform to those definitions. The following three paragraphs and buttons are the result. As of right now, I haven't touched them.
Thomas Nagel proposed that an organism is conscious just in case there is “something that it is like to be that organism” — a subjective character of experience that no amount of objective, third-person description can capture. Consciousness, on this view, is the felt quality of being the thing in question.
Nagel, T. (1974). What is it like to be a bat? The Philosophical Review, 83(4), 435–450.
Bernard Baars argued that consciousness functions as a global workspace: a central stage on which information is broadcast to the mind's many specialized, unconscious processors, making it widely available for memory, planning, language, and action. A state is conscious when its contents are globally accessible in this way.
Baars, B. J. (1988). A cognitive theory of consciousness. Cambridge University Press.
David Rosenthal's higher-order thought theory holds that a mental state is conscious when it is accompanied by a roughly simultaneous thought about being in that state. What makes a perception conscious is not the perception itself, but the mind's thought that it is having it.
Rosenthal, D. M. (2005). Consciousness and mind. Oxford University Press.