With this definition, it’s hard not to care about consciousness. As Yuval Noah Harari puts it in his book Homo Deus:4 “If any scientist wants to argue that subjective experiences are irrelevant, their challenge is to explain why torture or rape are wrong without reference to any subjective experience.” Without such reference, it’s all just a bunch of elementary particles moving around according to the laws of physics—and what’s wrong with that?
