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this post was submitted on 04 Aug 2026
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No Stupid Questions
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No such thing. Ask away!
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Although I think it's probably not a bad idea to think about it this way, it does create the next unhelpful question of "when is something conscious enough?", so it kinda dodges the hard question. So it simultaneously is useful and useless to think about it in this way.
I think your question is equally poorly defined regardless of where the zero point is placed. Enough for what? What is this threshold for?
There are often things in nature that have natural "division points" along some particular spectrum, where conditions abruptly change (phase changes in chemicals when they pass through transition temperatures, for example) or where you have natural gaps where you don't find many examples because of dynamic feedback effects (the gap between planets and dwarf planets when it comes to their ability to clear their orbital neighborhoods, for example). It's possible that once we can actually measure consciousness and put a number to it we'll find that there are similar gaps, for whatever reason. That would be a very interesting and useful thing to know about. But that's putting the cart before the horse, we don't know how to measure consciousness in a numeric way yet. So any such patterns in the results are purely hypothetical.
Yeah but that's exactly what I mean when I say that defining consciousness as a scale brings us no closer to the (poorly defined) questions we have about these things. We don't even know if we should define it as a one-dimensional number.
"When is something conscious?"
"Well it's a scale so once it has a high enough consciousness number"
"Okay, so at what point in the scale do we consider it conscious?"
"Well that depends on how you want to define 'conscious'"
So you get stuck with essentially the same question. And I think that expressing it as a scale also runs into the problem of "how do you measure it then?" which basically requires answering the original consciousness-question again.