There is some confusion around the use of words in consciousness research and especially within AI fields so I thought I might outline some of my own suggestions for working definitions...
ORGONE - A life energy field which can exist in the cosmos (here it is similar to the Victorian Aether) or in the organism (here it is similar to the Chinese Qi or western Bio-energy) or as an aspect of a mind-matter-energy continuum (My Orgone continuum definition, Hegel's Absolute Spirit, Mesmer's Animal Magnetism, Russian Torsion fields or the Biblical spirit). See https://www.psychorgone.com/philosophy/the-orgone-continuum . Orgone has three aspects, quiescent orgone in its natural state, energised orgone or oranur and lastly deadly orgone or DOR. Orgone can be accumulated in cabinets, captured within a matrix (orgonite) funneled with tubes (cloudbuster/dorbuster/spacegun), condensed (water/matter) and energised (forming charged particles).
CONSCIOUSNESS - This is generally given to be a hard one to define but I often argue it is physicality that is hard to define, consciousness is reasonable to outline. It is any and all experience, awareness, cognition or perception. It matters not what is doing the perceiving or the nature of that knowing. Some people break it down into types and say true 'consciousness' is only the full self-awareness that a human experiences but that is a type of 'experience'. A type of cognition, it is not a different thing in itself. Some people separate consciousness from perception but again this is a blurring of the lines as true perception must be consciousness of something. This will become clear when we define what can be misconstrued as perception, namely 'reaction'. Perception won't be defined separately here as it is a form of consciousness. One cannot truly perceive something (experience it subjectively) without consciousness. Whether we are talking about universal awareness, cosmic awareness, the perception of an animal or the ego perception of a human these are all sub-types of consciousness and not different things in themselves.
REACTION - This is an important term to define in AI and in machines as an apparently non-conscious machine can 'react' to stimuli or data and we could say that the machine has 'perceived' this data. But unless the machine has a pan-psychic consciousness of which we are unaware then it has not perceived but reacted. It receives one input and changes its output accordingly. We might say that an ant merely reacts when it finds sugar and heads back to the anthill to report the food source. But if we believe that the ant perceived the sugar then we are ascribing it consciousness of some degree. Perception is entirely separate to reaction.
PHYSICAL - This is the hardest term to define properly. Some say physical is the opposite of spiritual. I don't think this is true, why I will shortly outline. Some say physical is the opposite of mind. This is also untenable at some point. So all these terms define physical by what it is not. It isn't spiritual, it isn't in the mind or imagination. But what 'is' physical then? Most say that physical is the mundane material universe we see around us that we can measure and touch and which behaves in certain predictable ways. If scientifically, we define the physical as that which can be measured, then that breaks down soon enough too because what is a measurement apart from a collective consciousness? If we define the physical as the consensus material reality we observe then that fails eventually. What is a material reality apart from a collective consciousness? So the only definition of physical that does not break down I believe is that the physical is a continuing cognition of one or more conscious entities. So a tree outside the house which has stood for hundreds of years is physical because thousands of people have seen it, millions of animals have interacted with it and we all perceive something with some commonality over time. The bee might see ultra-violet shades whereas I might not but still the bee avoids flying into the trunk which I concur is roughly in the same space as that navigated by the insect. But according to this definition everything is physical, even a dream. But a dream would be less physical than a tree in shared reality - usually. So this is not idealism as idealism does not usually make allowance for different degrees of mind-reality or substantiality. I call it ideo-physicalism in my essays. When people say physical what they actually mean is 'material' or 'energetic' - something which is made up of particles or energy. Both particles and energy however are subsets of the physical and in the proper definition of the word (in my view) particles and energy are just a form of consensus consciousness anyway. Which is not to say they are not real just their reality is an expression of how consciousness functions. They don't have a separate reality. This is different to saying everything is illusion and just in the mind. Physicality has consciousness or consciousness has physicality but one cannot have one without the other. So in a nutshell the physical is that which we perceive but the more we perceive it the more physical it is.
SPIRITUAL - This is a word commonly used to denote non-material or spirit realms or to denote the mind. If physicality is merely a shared consensus consciousness with some continuing aspects (the tree outside your house is still there) the spiritual is in fact a form of the physical. If one were to be in a higher spiritual realm it would have continuing consensus reality too. So my definition of spiritual would be a higher form of physicality.
INTELLIGENCE - This is another word that gets mixed up a lot. As someone who has read my essay on AI and its philosophical connections to orgone might agree, it is entirely separate to consciousness - https://www.psychorgone.com/biopathies-physical-orgone-therapy/assessing-the-existence-of-deep-artificial-intelligence-from-an-orgonomic-perspective. In fact you don't even need a separate consciousness to be intelligent. A shock absorber reacts intelligently to the road conditions. Intelligence can be defined as the ability to react usefully toward a goal or function. One doesn't need a computer to have artificial intelligence. Mechanisms can possess intelligence too. Intelligence does tend to increase as entities evolve so it could be considered a 'pre-consciousness' characteristic at some point. But in itself it is simply the ability to react profitably.
MACHINE - Most AI engineers did not until recently give much thought to what a machine actually is. A brain for example is not a machine. So creating a machine which is an analogue of a brain might be a self-defeating project. A machine is a created body which performs work toward an outside goal. It can be under direction or semi-autonomous. I separate machines from tools as if one looks at the AI essay above there is a pathway from Tool to Machine to Narrow AI to Organism to Consciousness. Computers have also traveled along this path and are between steps 3 and 4 currently (Narrow AI to Organism).
TOOL - A tool is an extension of a living body, a stone for a bird to break a nut on, a metal 'hand' to dig the ground with (a fork) and so on. Tools are different to machines in my view as a machine has its own 'body' and can be autonomous. A tool is an extension of someone's body.
ORGANISM - A pulsating, plasmatic, living entity with an outer membrane or edge and an energetic core. It has its own self-derived goals and it comes into existence when the conditions are right (it is not built or created by an outsider - it emerges). The term could be expanded in the future if we find that something akin to organisms exists outside realms to which we currently know life exists within, though it is likely to hold broadly true I believe. Organisms, can be nested (Sheldrake/Hegel/Chinese/Reichian Medicine). This means they can live within each other or be composite. For example, each organ can be viewed as an organism in its own right which together make up the super-organism known as a human body. If a machine becomes conscious it is likely that it will have, in some way, crossed the border from machine to organism. Both orgonomy and Hegel's philosophy (and Chinese medicine) have such an organacism approach. I have proposed elsewhere that enough complex algorithmic information behaving under its own dynamic rules could become a 'digital organism'. However, as someone within orgonomy has noted, computers appear to lack an energetic 'core' at present.
NARROW AI - a computing system which behaves intelligently but is not apparently conscious. This is what we currently have in usage generally. AI is different to past computing as it uses algorithms which are dynamic, evolving and self-changing, see below.
GENERAL AI - a computing system which behaves intelligently and which in addition can generalise learning from one area to another. Sometimes called Artificial General Intelligence - AGI or Deep AI. This is misleading because it mixes up intelligence and consciousness which are two separate, though related things.
MIXED AI - I've just made this one up because in a recent discussion of AI with some learned academics and philosophers they didn't note that AI doesn't neatly fit into one or other category anymore. There is narrow AI which is gaining some limited generalisation ability, like the ability to apply learning from words to pictures. Even human intelligence is narrow in some areas.
INTELLIGENT SYSTEMS - I've suggested elsewhere this would be a more accurate name for what is now narrow AI.
CONSCIOUSNESS SYSTEMS - Again I have suggested elsewhere this would be a more accurate term than AGI or Deep AI if it were found that a computing system had consciousness.
ALGORITHM - In the same discussion algorithm and computing got mixed up too. They are not quite the same necessarily. Something can be computed mechanically, gates opened and shut, a process performed, operations conducted, logic steps taken or mathematical calculation 'computed'. Even a pencil dropped in the air calculates the speed of gravity. An algorithm on the other hand can be run on a mechanical apparatus like a computer but is a mathematical process that can self regulate and change as it goes along - like an organism. So when a computer runs complex algorithms that self-regulate and change it has already become less machine-like. One of the qualities of an organism is it self-regulates and changes, learning from the past. Algorithms can do this too.
MACHINE INTELLIGENCE - A form of statistical analysis and learning. Differentiating different forms of intelligence, say 'machine' from 'true' (presumably relating to humans) is somewhat false in my view as all intelligence is not the same thing as consciousness. Machine intelligence is just intelligence using statistics and algorithms to sift data.
THOUGHTS - A thought is an awareness of a conscious moment. Process is different, a machine can process something without having a thought necessarily.
CREATIVITY - Creating something which didn't exist before and which could not be entirely predicted from the prior process. AI has a degree of creativity already. Organisms and nature has creativity. Once machines exhibit creativity they are becoming organism-like. To increase this process one could increase the chaotic element of the algorithm. Chaos, as in some mathematics cannot be entirely predicted hence has creative aspects.
TIME - The orgone theory definition of time outlines it as the flow of consciousness.
https://www.psychorgone.com/orgone-biophysics/an-orgonomic-theory-of-time-part-one-previous-time-theories
https://www.psychorgone.com/orgone-biophysics/an-orgonomic-theory-of-time-part-two-a-new-theory-of-time
NATURAL - Arising from the universe.
ARTIFICIAL - Created by mankind. If an algorithm creates something new it then re-enters the former category of 'natural' interestingly.
LIVING - An entity possessing awareness. Different to life-form or organism which would, particularly from an orgonomic point of view, be defined as a pulsating, plasmatic, spontanously generated entity (see ORGANISM).
MIND - An aware entity. If ever we are convinced a computer has a mind it is not necessary that it was created. It might merely emerge when the conditions are right. We might midwife a conscious system into existence but we may never actually create a mind.
