Consciousness and its expression

One cannot express their conscious ideas by articulation without actually being conscious. (For an unconscious thing to express consciousness would make it a zombie of some kind).

It is normal to assume that consciousness is necessary for expression of consciousness.

I think that a conscious being must react to its consciousness and some action or vocalization is likely, but is this expression or simply reaction? What do you mean by expression when you speak of the expression of consciousness? Forgive me. I am not aware of the textbook definitions you may be working with. I do understand that you are saying consciousness is required for expression to occur, and you are asking if expression indeed MUST occur where there is consciousness. You appear to interpret expression broadly and not limit it to vocal expression, but I'm not sure how broadly I may take it.

Samm

Although I don't like to merely quibble, I cannot at all see what you are saying in either of these sentences.

The first sentence seems on the face of it to be a tautology, or something close to a tautology, in that it presupposes that the person in question (the "they" of the "their") has conscious ideas, and is therefore conscious, therefore the sentence implicitly presupposes what it asserts.

As for the sentence in parentheses, it supposes, hypothetically, that there is an unconscious thing which expresses consciousness, which would appear to be a logical contradiction, rather than a condition applicable to a zombie (or anything else for that matter).

I can only make sense of this by supposing that when you speak of "expressing consciousness", you do not mean to imply that the consciousness "expressed" actually exists. If so, it seems a rather confusing form of words to use. However, it does seem to be borne out by the sentence you wrote immediately before the two I quoted, viz,:
- because by pointing out that this is a "normal assumption", you are implicitly questioning it, you are implying that it is not necessarily true.

So it does seem that by the phrase "to express consciousness", you must mean something like "making a claim which, if true, implies being conscious" - or rather, more generally, "behaving in a way which suggests to a human observer that consciousness is somehow involved in the behaviour".

However, if that is what you mean, then the answers to both of your questions would seem to be trivially "No", because:

(1) I could easily write a simple computer program which prints (or speaks) the sentence "Cogito ergo sum", or even "I am conscious", but (I take it to be obvious) this no more implies the presence of any actual consciousness that would the printing or speaking of a string of nonsense syllables.

(2) I can be conscious and say nothing, even play dead.

It looks as if what we are doing here is a kind of psychoanalysis, in which we are trying to get clear about (1) what it means for a mental process to be "conscious" (e.g. can one's state of mind in a dream be called "conscious"?), and (2) depending on the answer to (1), how does one tell when something "conscious" is going on?

If so, then these are questions both difficult and fascinating.

But am I superimposing some of my own preoccupations on yours?

I have another question. Does consciousness incorporate intelligence or is intelligence a separate mental faculty? Is it possible for an unintelligent entity to possess consciousness, or can only an intelligent being be conscious? I have tended to characterize the two distinctly, but I have the impression that your understanding of consciousness necessarily includes intelligence. I appreciate clarification on this point.

Samm

My main concern here is ethics; I would like to know if it is possible to dismiss certain objects as unconscious and therefore incapable of real suffering.