The idea that everything is conscious is gaining academic credibility (2018)

So consciousness is some kind of messy combination of matter, responding to inputs, to connections between particles. This feels wholly inadequate. My human consciousness is reduced when I get shot in the head but the particles are still there, so think about when my brain deteriorates, when I die. If you put my matter into a container all that matter is still there but I'm no longer able to have human consciousness (unless there is some kind of thing outside of physical laws, which I am not going to just jump to).

So this feels like a useless definition. Like the computational power of something is a product of it's mass. It's much more than that.

I don't think there's any need to invoke as "magical" an idea as consciousness being a "fundamental property of matter" to reach the conclusion that many more things than we think are conscious.

A 10,000 ft view of the human brain includes: memory, emotional state, sensory input, ability to monitor and control internal processes including memory and emotion, motor control, and a logical system to tie these together as a system that attempts to achieve internal goals guided by memory and emotional state. Other mammalian and animal brains generally are presumably very similar.

What I don't understand is the need to invoke a je ne sais quoi -- a soul, quantum mechanics, whatever pseudo-matter the article is talking about -- to explain consciousness. Why should the above processes themselves not be sufficient to give rise to what we experience as consciousness, as an emergent phenomenon? It's not in everything, but it's in everything that has more-or-less all the pieces above. We could even make a crude consciousness, with today's technology.

It's like if, in trying to understand the essence of language, after analyzing lexical and grammatical structure and successfully describing all the visible parts of a language, linguists just shrugged and said "well this is how English works but don't know what makes it a language... there must be something invisible that is key". Well no, it turns out it is just the parts we can see and describe that are sufficient. We can even make one by putting those parts together (Esperanto... despite some linguists who do -- bizarrely, to me -- claim it lacks a "je ne sais quoi"...) and it acts just like a real "language".

I guess what's tricky is, unlike language, there's no way to "inhabit" an artificial consciousness to try it out and see if it really is "real". Many humans don't believe animals are conscious despite overwhelming biological and behavioral similarities. What sort of test of an artificial consciousness would not be hand-waved away as merely a simulacrum? One might even say the only falsifiable definition of a conscious entity -- other humans included -- is whether it has similar enough brain-parts as yourself.

...and also with the word "gaining".

Because the above processes are too slow. Our society has a slow framework to move physical goods around and a layer above where we move information around at a much higher pace. That upper layer can be called a soul of our society.

It's not useless, it's a valid approach to study the subject.

Consciousness here is downgraded to a very "simple form", to more fundamental components that all matter possess in a way or another. So it does not mean that a rock is sentient like your mind is. It's more like saying, ie, that quantum entanglement could be a component of consciousness. A rock could interact with quantum entanglement, therefore it would be plausible that a rock could have a tremendously primitive form of consciousness.