Inspired by:
(I could do a post on virtually every statement and question in this video but my writing doesn’t profit me, and the world you’ve created requires that I seek profit. You people don’t even comment. So if you want more than the bare minimum I write to keep myself sane and entertained, help me to profit from my work, or share your profits with me.)
There are subjective answers and such but for me the best practical answer is that consciousness informs ethics. We don’t care about sawing a rock in half because we all agree it has no experience, no consciousness, no qualia. We care about sawing a kitten in half because it is not like a rock in this way, and a brief look at human monstrosity and the actions of sadistic psychopathy depends intrinsically it would seem on a situation where the object of torment is somehow down graded in only one universal way: Being less conscious. Being less human. Being more animal, or being more false.
So not only is the study of consciousness important, it is in what one might call the hierarchy of endeavors actually paramount.
For there are two axiomatic features to existence which give it “meaning” or “value” universally and those features are existence, and enjoyability, neither of which are possible without consciousness.
Assuming a rock doesn’t have an internal experience, then in a way that rock doesn’t exist. There is no experience/consciousness for “Mr. Rock” therefor there can be no existence and no enjoyment/suffering.
It’s a popular idea well explored in fiction that one must consider two things of any action, and one is axiomatically more important than the other: can we do a thing and should we do a thing. Understanding consciousness is the very foundation of how we determine what should be done.
One could very easily argue that the core problem with the world today is a pandemic lack of empathy, and what is empathy but the recognition of consciousness in others coupled with value for it? And could it not also be argued that this recognition is linked to degree of similarity assessment. Such as is lacking with the cliche racist idea (or with how we treat arbitrarily selected animal species) “well they don’t feel pain the way we(I) do.”
I think a system wind fascination with this idea is part of our fascination with zombies. Zombies are humans minus experience, freeing us from all constraint that awareness of secondary experience bounds us to.
So to sum up the study of consciousness is the very core of what it means to be human if you define human in the same sort of sense as you define what it is to be humane.
See also: https://plus.google.com/+BrandonSergent/posts/GyYMZ4wLZN4