> How can I empirically determine if some object/animal/thing possesses consciousness?
You can't, that's just the issue and that's what gives rise to behaviorism, solipsism, etc. etc.
Sure, you could arbitrarily decided that some brain state Y recorded by instruments xzw in the field of neuroscience is a state of 'consciousness' but this is hardly a step up from heuristic methods we've used since the dawn of time, namely duck typing--if the thing looks like its conscious, and acts like its conscious, it is probably conscious.
Consciousness is one of those problems that becomes more problematic once you harp on it but only presents itself as a problem in practice in very rare cases.
Sure you could argue the issue will gain in relevancy as AI + machine learning becomes more sophisticated--but at this point there's still very much an uncanny valley that enables us to easily differentiate between biological and purely computational/mechanical systems.
When it comes to consciousness I think we do well to remember Wittgenstein's advice on doubting--that a doubt is really only worthwhile when it's useful in some fashion. To doubt just for the sake of it, or just because we can is usually not productive and leads us nowhere. Doubts are useful insofar as they are precise and rub up against propositions we hold true with some degree of firmness (actually to be able to doubt at all requires we hold some confident assertions, e.g. one of them in the case of studying consciousness: "no matter what the study says, I'm confident at the very least, that I am conscious").
You can't, that's just the issue and that's what gives rise to behaviorism, solipsism, etc. etc.
Sure, you could arbitrarily decided that some brain state Y recorded by instruments xzw in the field of neuroscience is a state of 'consciousness' but this is hardly a step up from heuristic methods we've used since the dawn of time, namely duck typing--if the thing looks like its conscious, and acts like its conscious, it is probably conscious.
Consciousness is one of those problems that becomes more problematic once you harp on it but only presents itself as a problem in practice in very rare cases.
Sure you could argue the issue will gain in relevancy as AI + machine learning becomes more sophisticated--but at this point there's still very much an uncanny valley that enables us to easily differentiate between biological and purely computational/mechanical systems.
When it comes to consciousness I think we do well to remember Wittgenstein's advice on doubting--that a doubt is really only worthwhile when it's useful in some fashion. To doubt just for the sake of it, or just because we can is usually not productive and leads us nowhere. Doubts are useful insofar as they are precise and rub up against propositions we hold true with some degree of firmness (actually to be able to doubt at all requires we hold some confident assertions, e.g. one of them in the case of studying consciousness: "no matter what the study says, I'm confident at the very least, that I am conscious").