> I realize you're using ghosts as an analogy

I think you are missing the point. The analogy is about why burden of proof is in a certain direction and the error you're making in logic is the exact same those that argue for ghosts make. It is also a call to "Ghost in the machine"

> I'm saying this isn't about anything mystical.

You may think this, but you are relying on mysticism. But don't think this is me calling you dumb. It's so fucking easy to accidentally invent ghosts. There's a reason it takes so long to invent new knowledge, why it took humans so long to get to this point. Because we keep unintentionally inventing ghosts along the way. In the same advice I gave to the other person you're arguing with, stop trying to do it all on your own. Maybe you are smarter than the millions of people who have tried to figure it out before you, but certainly you have to recognize that leveraging the works of others will greatly increase your chances of success, right? You didn't try to invent calculus from scratch, so why this?

> I'm not trying to pigeonhole you.

I don't believe you are trying to, but there's plenty of things I try not to do and fail at. I am frustrated, but not angry. Like what makes you think I don't think humans are more conscious than cats? I've explicitly stated we're in agreement in a continuum. But you do seem to still have ignored the part of semantics with regards to thresholds and come on, if you understand don't argue something you know I'm not arguing. If you think the semantic difference is critical, then be fucking pedantic, not continue to talk at such a high level. But maybe you think our fictitious conscious function is linearly growing. I would highly doubt that. There's quite a large gap between many creatures. Not to mention that even in a single person we see consciousness rapidly develop during childhood. So I don't know why you're harping on this point, because I haven't seen any single person in the comments contend with this argument.

> You can ask the question "is this blue?" and have a coherent answer.

But this is wrong! This is demonstrably false. We don't even have to look at people with colorblindness nor people from history[0] (I specifically used blue because the history part makes this far more apparent), optical illusions[1], nor other (mother) languages[2]. While everyone is going to agree that #0000ff is blue, people are not going to agree on #7B68EE, which plenty will call purple. Here's a literal example[3]. This is the point with this example. It is easy to think that these are discrete terms but concepts like blue (or any other color) are categorical representations, not discrete. They also have multi-dimensional boundaries and there's a continuum of disagreement by people when you move from one category to another. It helps to create subcategories, but Turquoise is still a blue that many people will call green[4]. Worse, the same person can disagree with themselves, and no way is that coherent. Fwiw, I score 0 on this test[5], so if you want to see if we disagree you can check (I've also been tested in person).

> You need to ask the question "what is this conscious of?".

Whatever answer anyone gives, is almost certainly wrong.

The thing is, everything is fuzzy. Embrace the chaos, because if we're going to talk about brains and consciousness and abstractions, well you're not going to be able to work with things that are concrete. But, this too is fuzzy and I think you're likely to misinterpret. Just because everything is fuzzy doesn't mean there aren't things that are more wrong than others. It's more that you can't have infinite precision. So stop trying to deal in absolute answers, especially when we're in topics that people are have been unable to solve for thousands of years.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blue#History

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_dress

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linguistic_relativity_and_the_...

[3] https://www.reddit.com/r/colors/comments/1ao2osm/is_this_col...

[4] https://www.color-meanings.com/shades-of-blue-color-names-ht...

[5] https://www.xrite.com/hue-test