[Thanks to Charlie Steiner, Richard Kennaway, and Said Achmiz for helpful discussion. Extra special thanks to the Long-Term Future Fund for funding research related to this post.]

[Epistemic status: confident]

There's a common pattern in online debates about consciousness. It looks something like this:

One person will try to communicate a belief or idea to someone else, but they cannot get through no matter how hard they try. Here's a made-up example:

"It's obvious that consciousness exists."

-Yes, it sure looks like the brain is doing a lot of non-parallel processing that involves several spatially distributed brain areas at once, so-

"I'm not just talking about the computational process. I mean qualia obviously exist."

-Define qualia.

"You can't define qualia; it's a primitive. But you know what I mean."

-I don't. How could I if you can't define it?

"I mean that there clearly is some non-material experience stuff!"

-Non-material, as in defying the laws of physics? In that case, I do get it, and I super don't-

"It's perfectly compatible with the laws of physics."

-Then I don't know what you mean.

"I mean that there's clearly some experiential stuff accompanying the physical process."

-I don't know what that means.

"Do you have experience or not?"

-I have internal representations, and I can access them to some degree. It's up to you to tell me if that's experience or not.

"Okay, look. You can conceptually separate the information content from how it feels to have that content. Not physically separate them, perhaps, but conceptually. The what-it-feels-like part is qualia. So do you have that or not?"

-I don't know what that means, so I don't know. As I said, I have internal representations, but I don't think there's anything in addition to those representations, and I'm not sure what that would even mean.

and so on. The conversation can also get ugly, with boldface author accusing quotation author of being unscientific and/or quotation author accusing boldface author of being willfully obtuse.

On LessWrong, people are arguably pretty good at not talking past each other, but the pattern above still happens. So what's going on?

The Two Intuition Clusters

The basic model I'm proposing is that core intuitions about consciousness tend to cluster into two camps, with most miscommunication being the result of someone failing to communicate with the other camp. I will call the camp o...

Consciousness Discourse