The assertati9n "Consciousness requires subjective experience, and that comes only when information is received from probing, sensory tissues -- those of the body." seems like it's mincing words; they seem to be defining consciousness as "awareness of one's surroundings", which at best is stretching the definition of the term
I do not claim any special expertise on the subject, other than I believe I know when I am conscious, and I believe I usually, consciously know when I am dreaming. However, the simplest definition of consciousness, as per
Wikipedia, is as follows:
'
Consciousness is the state or quality of awareness or of being aware of an external object or something within oneself. It has been defined variously in terms of sentience, awareness, qualia, subjectivity, the ability to experience or to feel, wakefulness, having a sense of selfhood or soul, the fact that there is something "that it is like" to "have" or "be" it, and the executive control system of the mind. Despite the difficulty in definition, many philosophers believe that there is a broadly shared underlying intuition about what consciousness is. As Max Velmans and Susan Schneider wrote in
The Blackwell Companion to Consciousness: "Anything that we are aware of at a given moment forms part of our consciousness, making conscious experience at once the most familiar and most mysterious aspect of our lives." You become aware that your actions have an effect on other people.'
Here's the link:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ConsciousnessIt appears to me that Dr. Hideya Sakaguchi's statement is consistent with the very first sentence of the
Wikipedia definition.
So, how does your definition of consciousness differ from Dr. Sakaguchi's, and that of
Wikipedia?
And, why does the definition of consciousness bother you more than a future that will include “floating disembodied conscious brains?”