So when I use the word "consciousness, " / I'm not talking about higher-order thinking / or complex thought, / or things that we think of / in terms of human consciousness. // But when I use the word "consciousness," / I'm talking about awareness, / felt experience, / sentience / interchangeably / to talk about this more fundamental sense of consciousness. // And this can exist without thought. / It could exist in a very simple organism / that is not capable of thought. // But even in our human experience, / we think of a very young child / or an infant / we know that there's still felt experiences: / feeling pressure against the skin, / hearing sounds in the room, / the experience of heat or cold. // And there's clearly consciousness there, / and it doesn't necessarily entail thought. // So the study of consciousness / has largely, / if not entirely, / been relegated to neuroscience, / which makes a lot of sense / because we have assumed / that the organisms that are conscious / are the ones that are most like us. // And we're complex systems. / The brain is the most complex system / in the universe that we know of. // And so we assume / that consciousness arises out of that complex processing. // But some of these intuitions / that we're relying on / to make that assumption / have been overturned by modern neuroscience / and have been shown to be illusions. // So when we're trying to think more clearly / and more creatively about consciousness, / there are two questions / that I think / really get at the heart / of where these intuitions are misleading us. // Number one, / is there any evidence we can find / from outside an organism, / or outside a system, / that will conclusively tell us / that that organism entails conscious experiences? // And the second question is, / is consciousness doing something? / Does it serve a function? / Is it driving our behavior / in the way that we feel it is? // And our intuitive answer / to both of these questions / is a resounding yes. // But, surprisingly, / it's easier to puncture these intuitions, / or to shake them up, / than you might think. //