Michael Pollan

Pretty simple.

You don't have to include things like self-consciousness or meta-consciousness in it.

Those are kind of bells and whistles that humans have added.

I doubt many animals have them.

Yeah, so consciousness is the fact that the lights are on, and it's synonymous with the fact of experience, whatever we're experientially aware of altogether, I guess.

So sentience still can be described, I mean, I guess the crucial line for me, and for many people who think about this, is that

things like life, things like sentience can be given a description from the outside in terms of their functional characteristics.

I mean, does something reproduce?

Does it, you know, metabolize?

Does it grow, et cetera?

These are characteristics of life.

And then, you know, the boundary conditions can be somewhat diffuse.

And so it can be hard to say whether, you know, a virus is alive in the way that, you know, a bacterium is alive, et cetera.

But

And so it is, I think, with sentience, at least under the definition you gave it.

But consciousness is the fact that it's like something, to use Nagel's now immortal phrase, to be what we are.

And if it's like something to be a bat, well, then that would be consciousness in the case of a bat.

And that's obviously his famous example from his essay, What Is It Like to Be a Bat?

And this disgorges...

what the philosopher David Chalmers has named the hard problem of consciousness, which I've already invoked without defining it, but it's just a simple fact that it seems that there's no third-person description of the way the world is that reduces the mystery that it should be like something from the first-person side to be associated with any collection of