The most fiercely defended debates in the battle to defend human specialness is the very core of human mentality: consciousness and its surrogates, meaningfulness and aboutness.
consciousness has surfaced mainly in the guise of aboutness.
The debate was, in that setting, mainly about semantics: how could symbols relate to things? Neuroscience moved the focus of this debate from aboutness to awareness. Part of the motivation for this refocusing was practical: neuroscience has deep roots in medicine, and a crucial medical question, particularly in surgery, is whether the patient is aware of anything at all.
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