Celene's thoughts on consciousness

Scott Alexander was there, and ran a Q&A session where participants could ask him questions and he would respond to them unless the questions were about eulogies, in which case he would pause to think for a few seconds before kindly passing. At one point or another, the questions drifted to theories of consciousness.As a kind-of-illusionist, I worked up the courage to raise my hand and ask him what I should do if I wasn’t sure if I was conscious. Everybody laughed at this question, and while I expected Scott to respond to the philosophical point, he instead said (paraphrased from memory, may not be accurate),I actually don’t think that’s a funny question. I know of one historical example of someone who got into a traumatic accident, and afterwards claimed that he stopped being conscious. He behaved fully normally otherwise, except for the part where he was like, “It’s really messed up how I’m not conscious now.” And so, I think it’s kind of like aphantasia, right, where some people have a harder time visualizing things, or [I don’t remember if the other example he gave was anosognosia or somatoparaphrenia, but I think it was one of them]. And it’s well known that people who have had traumatic experiences can experience less rich and intense sensations, that people with depression can experience their vision as being washed out, and less colorful. I think that along with this, people who have been traumatized might also have a less rich sense of being conscious. So if you’re actually asking for advice, I’d say, “Check if you’re traumatized, and then if you are, do standard trauma-informed therapy.”Now, this was such an epic roast[1] that it took me several minutes to work up the courage to raise my hand again, and clarify that I actually wanted to hear his thoughts on illusionism.You mean, the idea that no one is conscious? …I think that people generally have a very strong, innate felt sense of c