Zooby's objections are understandable, largely because the article is not very explicit what it means by consciousness. For instance, the following quote.
"Humans are different. We can apply specific information to many other unrelated events or actions. We're flexible. This is consciousness."
What the speaker should say is that this is a noted
aspect of consciousness. Behavioral flexibility does not exhaust the notion of what consciousness is. In particular, there is phenomenal consciousness, or subjective experience-- the perceived 'blueness' of blue, for instance. One can speak of flexible behavioral tasks without ever invoking the subjective experience of blueness. So this is only an incomplete characterization of consciousness.
The majority of the article treats consciousness as if it means 'explicit introspective awareness' or 'self-awareness.' This aspect of consciousness is referred to in the literature as higher-order consciousness, or H-consciousness for short. However, importantly, the term 'consciousness' as a whole is not exhausted by H-consciousness. Other aspects of consciousness include discriminatory consciousness, responsive consciousness, and phenomenal consciousness. From http://publish.uwo.ca/~mcintosh/consc.htm :
H-consciousness (higher-order consciousness): missing when, for example, a driver gets home without "introspective awareness" of performing the task. Evidenced by the driver's failing to remember performing the task, and hence, by a lack of reportability.
D-consciousness (discriminatory consciousness): missing when, for example, a birdwatcher is looking right at a bird but cannot pick it out. Also evidenced by lack of reportability, though also by a failure to be able to perform the task in question.
R-consciousness (responsive consciousness): a general capacity to react rationally to the environment, which can be lacking in degrees. E.g., A drunk person passed out on the floor has very little, if any, R-consciousness; the drowsy person has some, and the alert person still more.
P-consciousness (phenomenal consciousness): the (perhaps quintessential?) aspect of consciousness; the "what-it-is-like". Reportability can vary with H-consciousness (a headache may not come and go, even when one is intermittently not "introspectively aware" of having it).
An interesting question now arises: can one be considered to be conscious in some sense even when one is not H-conscious? It is a difficult question, and the answer is not trivially "no." For instance, if I am cruising along in my car on 'autopilot,' without H-consciousness, one might reasonably state that I am still experiencing P-consciousness even though I am not explicitly aware of it. On this view, we would say that there is something it is like for me to drive even when I have no H-consciousness of my task performance. This seems to make some sense; if I suddenly become cognizant of the road before me, it is not as if this springs from a void of unconsciousness-- it is more like I suddenly become more intensely aware of the road.
Similarly, suppose the radio has been playing the whole time and I have not been paying attention, but I suddenly 'tune in' to the music being played. In retrospect, it is not as if someone has suddenly has turned on the radio. I may have some dim memory of the radio having been playing, even if I cannot say exactly what it was that was being played. This amounts to an argument for the presence of P-consciousness without H-consciousness. Of course, it is not this simple-- one may reason that I dimly remember the music playing in virtue of having a dim H-consciousness of it, or in virtue of 'just barely' paying attention to it. But in any case, it is not an open and shut case that one need be H-conscious in order to be conscious in any other sense.
I think we should also clarify what is meant by H-consciousness. H-consciousness, the aspect of consciousness referred to in the article, basically amounts to 'attention.' One need not be consciously deliberating over one's actions in order to be paying close attention to them. For instance, zooby says:
I like to watch baseball once in a while because when they show closeups of the pitcher as he sizes up the batter and also "reads" the man on first base, I see the face of a man who is exceptionally aware and alive, but who probably has only the most rudimentary of interior monologs going on. He is all about percieving and reacting with extreme precision, not about thinking.
Strictly speaking, having 'interior monologues,' or 'thinking' in the explicit sense, is not synonymous with H-consciousness. A pitcher can be paying attention to the tasks he is performing without consciously deliberating on them in the same sense that I can pay attention to my act of typing without consciously deliberating over the individual keystrokes. We also have examples from music where for instance, the musician occassionally has the incredible experience of 'watching' himself perform music without any sense that he is consciously directing his playing. This is a clear case of H-consciousness without interior monologue or deliberate, conscious behavioral control.
