Somebody used this paper to make the term batfished, which they defined as being fooled into ascribing subjectivity to a non-sentient actor (i.e. an AI).
https://partiallyexaminedlife.com/2025/06/30/what-is-it-like...
replies(3):
https://partiallyexaminedlife.com/2025/06/30/what-is-it-like...
The author inventing "batfished" also believes bats to be conscious, so it seems a very poorly conceived word, and anyways unnecessary since anthropomorphize works just fine... "You've just gaslighted yourself by anthropomorphizing the AI".
We have not proven "to a level of absolutely provable certainty" that other humans are also conscious. You can only tell you are conscious yourself, not others. The whole field of consciousness is based on analyzing something for which we have sample size n=1.
They say "because of similar structure and behavior" we infer others are also conscious. But that is a copout, we are supposed to reject behavioral and structural arguments (from 3rd person) in discussion about consciousness.
Not only that, but what would be an alternative to "it feels like something?" - we can't imagine non-experience, or define it without negation. We are supposed to use consciousness to prove consciousness while we can't even imagine non-consciousness except in an abstract, negation-based manner.
Another issue I have with the qualia framing is that nobody talks about costs. It costs oxygen and glucose to run the brain. It costs work, time, energy, materials, opportunity and social debt to run it. It does not sit in a platonic world.
That sounds like you are talking about subjective experience, qualia of senses and being, rather than consciousness (ability to self-observe), unless you are using "consciousness" as catch-all term to refer to all of the above (which is the problem with discussing consciousness - it's an overloaded ill-defined word, and people don't typically define what they are actually talking about).
If we make this distinction between consciousness, defined as ability to self-observe, and subjective qualia (what something feels like), then it seems there is little reason to doubt that others reporting conscious awareness really are aware of what they are reporting, and anyways given common genetics and brain anatomy it'd be massively unexpected if one (healthy) person had access to parts of their internal state and others didn't.
> Not only that, but what would be an alternative to "it feels like something?" - we can't imagine non-experience, or define it without negation. We are supposed to use consciousness to prove consciousness while we can't even imagine non-consciousness except in an abstract, negation-based manner.
Perhaps the medical condition of "blindsight" gives some insight - where damage to the visual cortex can result in people having some proven visual ability but no conscious awareness of it. They report themselves as blind, but can be tasked with walking down a cluttered corridor and manage to navigate the obstacles nonetheless. They have lost visual consciousness due to brain damage, but retain at least some level of vision.
While I have a lot of problems with their comment (which I elaborated on in a reply of my own), I don't think that using it as a catch-all term is a problem (to the extent that they would agree with that characterization). In fact, I think it's truer to the spirit of the problem than the definition that you're offering. I think a lot of times when people make the objection that we haven't defined it, they're not just saying we haven't selected from one of several available permutations, I take it to mean that there's a fundamental sense in which the idea itself hasn't agreeably crystallized into a definition, which among other things, is a meta question about which of the competing definitions is the right one to use.
I do think there is a tension in that position, because it creates a chicken and egg problem where you can't research it until you define it, but you can't define it until you research it. But I think there's a way out of it by treating them in as integrally related, and taking a practical attitude of believing in the possibility of progress without yet having a final answer in hand.
I understand that this notion of self-reflecting for some people is key, but I think choosing to prioritize other things can be for good reasons rather than, as you seem to be contending, having accidentally skipped the step of selecting a preferred definition from a handful of alternatives, and not having selected the best one. My feeling is much closer to that of the article, at least in a certain way, which is about the fact that there's "something it's like to be" at all, prior to the question of whether there's self-reflection.
In fact, I'd be curious to know what you call the mental state of being for such things as creatures with a kind of outwardly directed awareness of world, with qualia, with "something it's like to be", but which fall short of having self-reflective mental states. Because if your term for such things is that they don't involve consciousness I think it's not the GP who is departing from appropriate definitions. And if self-reflection is necessarily implied in the having of such things as qualia, then you could say it's implicitly accounted for by someone who wants to talk about qualia.