She's talking about Starfuckers incorporated.

Ok so this can quickly become very complicated.

Traditionally, the dominant religions tend to suggest a conscious entity called God imparted it into some clay with its innate magic.

Modern interpretation suggests that living things that can sense things in their surroundings will do better than ones that can't. If you can't see or hear a bear approaching, you are more likely to be eaten, and the same holds true for your own food, shelter, and baby-making.

All that sensation is useless without a response to what is causing the sensation. So the ability to move towards food or away from a threat is important too. So these faculties tend to start with simple rules and build in complexity over time, bit by bit, depending on how helpful it is to survival. Memory of locations helps too - you can find likely places food will exist, and find your nest after leaving it to find food for your babies.

Centralising and organising all these sensations and reactions so you can connect cause and effect is probably the start of consciousness. It will become an increasingly complex system of sensations, filtering and consequential behaviours within an expanding mental map of the surroundings built from the memory of sensations.

Having a mental resource/memory means you can learn what causes specific effects in your surroundings, including your own movements and decisions. This is the basic form of self awareness - me as an interior mind Vs the world. This is an advanced form of consciousness.

This can happen if you can sense things, respond to things, remember things. It can become more complex if your sensory system can detect activity in other parts of its own senses to moderate/inhibit/emphasise your responses. You don't want to listen to your blood and heart all the time, you don't want to spend all the effort on controlling your breathing unless you need to.

This sensation of sensation, and the inhibition of sensations, is the mix of consciousness and unconsciousness that makes everybody who they are.

There are known physical things, like punches to the heqd and anaesthesia, that can halt consciousness. You can't see without eyes and you can't think without a brain, which is why brain damage and dementia can make people confused and change personality. It's also why we can do surgery and people don't feel it.

Whoa

It's not technically incorrect, it just 'feels' like it is because it's uncommon. It's been used as a gender-exempt singular pronoun for well over a century, although the non-binary adoption is relatively new.

It's possible to care about more than one thing at once, and it is prudent to spread the word of the potential for AI to go haywire just like releasing the Panama papers or child abuse scandals in the Catholic church. Billionaires will almost certainly start deleting columns of jobs that AI will replace while simultaneously not being very interested in AI ethical game-breaking innovative strategies and unpredictable consequences. If we want to move to a better system of systems, we need to design our overlords well from the ground up.

Fellating, not eating.

They didn't distinguish between material and mythical back then. However, they did have parables which were understood to be fictive morality tales and the origin story was not to be understood simply as a parable, but a depiction of the cosmology of a bronze age people. Biblical and traditional theism involves an active god in world events, not simply a detached symbolic god and parables. Josephus referred to various events in Genesis as real and authentic in his histories of the Jews, for instance.

You can reword it to "tentative, seemingly reliable, predictable and useful conceptual relationships between abstracts and observations" if you like. I think we can usually clump together enough common ground to infer what was meant relative to the general thrust of the argument. I just wanted to be quick and non-weasel wordy with it.

I don't think you can learn/conceive of empty sets and non-empty sets (or that you think therefore you are) without sensation. While examples are thin on the ground*, the most reasonable self-awareness models rely on an ability to identify the self in one's environment and one's ability to move within it. Without sensation, brains, minds, whatever have nothing to define themselves into being.

*I did look into this years ago and found some rare cases of infants born without the ability to sense and obviously they did not develop properly and were effectively vegetables. Suggestive material exists for people with specific senses absent from birth missing certain experiences of self when dreaming and the like, although plasticity, rewiring the brain to use the visual systems with blindness have also been observed. The general point - that sensation precedes language, logic and self, and these things are genetically dependent on sensation in the hierarchy of knowledge - I think is defensible and reasonable to accept.

I may be missing something here.

>>Since the verification principle cannot easily be accommodated within the Humean fork, according to which all meaningful propositions must be either empirical propositions about matters of fact or analytic propositions concerning relations of ideas, it looks suspiciously like a foundational principle for a positivist metaphysics. Positivism, it seems, does not dispense with metaphysics; it merely proposes a different kind of (naturalist) metaphysics. Failure to reflect on the logical status of the verificationist principle, to acknowledge it as a heuristic principle which governs scientific knowledge of reality, therefore, not only encourages a form of methodological monism, one which denies the autonomy of other forms of knowing; it also betrays a commitment to an uncritical realism which assumes scientific method reveals the ultimate nature of reality and, in so doing, places science in the position once occupied by metaphysics as the science of pure being.

The interesting thing about "other forms of knowing" is that they'd have to be verified to prove that they can provide justified, true belief (i.e. knowledge), no? If not, how can we know they're true or not? And all of those forms of knowing will require their origins in sensation, for anyone born without sensation will never develop self-awareness or language because they need their senses to acquire those things through association and contradistinction.

As for scientific method revealing the ultimate state of reality, wouldn't that actually be beyond the scope? If you dispensed with metaphysics then the "ultimate nature of reality" is beyond your epistemology beyond a few language games like "I think therefore I am" which can't actually get around ideas like philosophical zombies and simulations.

Scientific method and verification as the arbiter of truth shifts to the generation of meaningful knowledge (i.e. epistemology) in a seemingly reliable frame of reference, regardless of the "ultimate nature of reality". For an open-ended scientific approach, it doesn't matter if that's a dream of Azathoth, the Matrix or the only existing real universe. It's just working with what is actually available to make realistic inferences and deductions. This doesn't fail verification in that if it didn't work, we'd have no expectation that all the things we engineer will work, and yet they do. It may not be a perfect metaphysical proof, but it is a strong, albeit open-ended epistemological justification.