Technology

Consciousness is something completely different. It’s what makes you fully feel the present moment. It’s the fact of feeling alive. So it has nothing to do with the ability to crunch numbers or stitch words together into a logical sequence.

And there’s one fact you can’t get around. Consciousness, in every case observed since we started studying it, only ever appears on biological substrate. Never on non-living matter. Never on stone, never on metal and never on silicon. So it’s a fact that looks an awful lot like a law of nature.

This bit strikes me as odd. It suggests we've done experiments to check whether consciousness ever occurs in non-biological systems, and concluded that wherever we find consciousness it's in a loving organism. But has anyone done such an experiment? Could they? Do we understand well enough what consciousness is, what it is for it to be present in an entity, and how to test for that empirically, that we can simply do experiments to test when it occurs and draw conclusions about laws of nature involving it?

You can't do an experiment until you can say, to a good enough approximation, what you're looking for and how you'll tell whether it occurs or not. I doubt we even have a clear enough notion of consciousness to agree on what we're talking about, let alone how to test whether it's present, to do empirical experiments and draw lawlike conclusions. And it's not that we just need to get a bit clearer about the kind of entity consciousness is: it's not even clear that it is an entity in the empirical world.