In my experience, when reading about consciousness there are a couple types of claims you should be cautious of:
1) Claims that the causes of consciousness can be easily explained. As far as I can tell, they can't. Usually these explanations use the word "emergent" a lot, and tend to be linguistically impenetrable. Often more poetic than scientific when scrutinized closely.
2) Claims that consciousness doesn't exist. These arguments often feel like semantic nitpicking, and employ the word "illusion" as though it's somehow useful for explaining why you experience.
My pet criteria for whether a statement about consciousness is useful is:
"Can this possibly help explain how I can merge consciousness with someone (or something) else?"
To me, this feels like a tangible measurement for how materially useful a claim about consciousness might be. An example is literature on "Split-Brain" patients (such as https://www.nature.com/articles/483260a).
edit:
Another category to be wary of is:
3) Claims that we cannot understand consciousness. Usually these boil down to "how can consciousness understand itself?". Poetic and poignant, but not particularly useful or scientifically grounded.
> "Can this possibly help explain how I can merge consciousness with someone (or something) else?"
Wait, what? Why do you suppose that you can merge consciousness with someone (or something) else, can you elaborate on that? The split-brain patients are cases with presumably separate consciousnesses that are not merged and AFAIK never get merged, especially after corpus callosotomy which would make it physically impossible, wouldn't it?
Yours is a very reasonable question. First of all, merging consciousness is admittedly a bit woo-woo; however, I feel it's worth considering.
According to the literature, when the corpus callosum is severed, it appears that the verbal part of the patient loses conscious access to parts of their body. However, those lost parts continue functioning independently, and are able to communicate non-verbally.
Put another way, it seems plausible that a conscious system is split into two conscious systems. This could imply the corpus callosum is involved in unifying conscious systems.
Additionally, I feel it's uncontroversial (from a materialist perspective) to claim that human consciousness can be built. Humans do it constantly through reproduction.
I suppose if consciousness is indeed an illusion then that would at least explain why it's so hard to understand. Or rather it may not be that it's hard to understand but understanding an illusion usually means dispelling it, which is problematic when that illusion is consciousness.
Then again claiming something is an illusion is usually less than helpful. Colour is an illusion of sorts (or a qualia if we're being technical), but 'colour is an illusion' is an unhelpful answer to the question 'why is the sky blue?'.
Consciousness is literally the only thing which can't be an illusion, because it's through consciousness that illusions are perceived in the first place. Cogito ergo sum; you can doubt what you are experiencing as much as you like, maybe it's a dream, maybe it's a simulation, maybe there's an evil demon deceiving you through magical means, but you can't doubt the fact that you are experiencing at all, even doubt itself is part of the experience.
1) Claims that the causes of consciousness can be easily explained. As far as I can tell, they can't. Usually these explanations use the word "emergent" a lot, and tend to be linguistically impenetrable. Often more poetic than scientific when scrutinized closely.
2) Claims that consciousness doesn't exist. These arguments often feel like semantic nitpicking, and employ the word "illusion" as though it's somehow useful for explaining why you experience.
My pet criteria for whether a statement about consciousness is useful is: "Can this possibly help explain how I can merge consciousness with someone (or something) else?" To me, this feels like a tangible measurement for how materially useful a claim about consciousness might be. An example is literature on "Split-Brain" patients (such as https://www.nature.com/articles/483260a).
edit: Another category to be wary of is:
3) Claims that we cannot understand consciousness. Usually these boil down to "how can consciousness understand itself?". Poetic and poignant, but not particularly useful or scientifically grounded.