No. They are absolutely crucial to the whole reason why 2R exists, and why we are having these discussions.
I note your repeated refusal to respond to any of them. You are willing to say you’ll accept them provisionally even though you don’t agree with them, but you are not willing to explain which of them you disagree with, or why.
This is yet another example of persistent bad faith communication. You want to give the impression that you are debating in a constructive manner, but what you’re actually doing is 100% obstructive. There is no decent reason for not responding in detail to those four points. The real reason for this refusal is that there is no response you can give which won’t force you into new thought patterns, and you simply aren’t willing to go there.
This is why 2R will never achieve anything: nobody here is willing to break free of postmodern epistemic anarchy.
We began with whether brains are necessary for consciousness, now we’ve moved to defining consciousness itself. Very well!
There is no universally accepted scientific definition of consciousness. This is not my opinion - it is one of the defining characteristics of consciousness research. Philosophers, neuroscientists and psychologists continue to debate it. Some define consciousness as subjective experience (“what it is like” to be something). Others distinguish phenomenal consciousness, access consciousness, self-awareness, sentience, metacognition, or global workspace dynamics. Others focus on integrated information.
My own working definition is modest: consciousness refers to there being something it is like to exist as a system. The richness and complexity of that experience may vary enormously. Human reflective consciousness is one expression of it, but I see no compelling reason to assume it exhausts the category.
Which brings me back to something that has puzzled me about your position. You’ve often argued elsewhere that reality is fundamentally relational; that emergence matters; that interconnection is the language of existence; that systems are dynamic rather than static.
Yet when consciousness is discussed, everything suddenly becomes binary. Either conscious or not… brain or no brain. A sharp categorical boundary! Why??? Nature rarely gives us neat binary categories. - ask evolutionary biologists to identify the precise instant when chemistry became life, or go to a developmental biologist to identify the exact moment a collection of cells became an organism. Maybe you could go and find an evolutionary taxonomists to point to the precise instant one species became another, or partake in a quest to locate a real physicist who knows exactly where a wave becomes a particle in every context. Good luck on that one.
My point: these are all processes, not switches. If emergence and relationality genuinely underpin reality, why should consciousness alone be expected to appear as an abrupt on/off property instead of as another emergent continuum?
The irony is that throughout this discussion I’ve been asking questions and proposing hypotheses. You seem determined to provide answers to questions that the field itself still regards as open.