This point of view could be applied to any word, and the extreme result is that you'd negate meaningful or useful communication, or that someone would have to be the arbiter of what is a legitimate concept or not.
Between vocabulary, commonly understood meaning, possible meaning, and actual personal experience, there are many detours and jumps. "Dog" as a word, concept/meaning, and experience, has these issues. What's not a dog, which dog are you thinking about, and does this apply to "dog" or just those specific dogs you've experienced? Etc.
Words like "consciousness", for less concrete experiences than "dog", tend to have more fog in the gaps between word and shared meaning, and between those and individual experience.
It seems like you're trying to flatten a person's curiosity about the implications of a shared concept or experience into a "mundane" phantasm about a word whose referent is either nonsensical or nonexistent to you.
I think that the gaps between word, concept, and experience, while confusing and difficult, are worthy of more respect and wonder than to just flatten them as though their existence didn't imply something potentially important and essential is happening there. Language arose because we have actual experience to share, however tricky it can be to verbalize. It doesn't work perfectly, and leads to confusion, but here we are, reading and writing.
"Consciousness" may be a word for a slippery concept/experience, but that doesn't equate to questions about consciousness being inherently semantic.
Between vocabulary, commonly understood meaning, possible meaning, and actual personal experience, there are many detours and jumps. "Dog" as a word, concept/meaning, and experience, has these issues. What's not a dog, which dog are you thinking about, and does this apply to "dog" or just those specific dogs you've experienced? Etc.
Words like "consciousness", for less concrete experiences than "dog", tend to have more fog in the gaps between word and shared meaning, and between those and individual experience.
It seems like you're trying to flatten a person's curiosity about the implications of a shared concept or experience into a "mundane" phantasm about a word whose referent is either nonsensical or nonexistent to you.
I think that the gaps between word, concept, and experience, while confusing and difficult, are worthy of more respect and wonder than to just flatten them as though their existence didn't imply something potentially important and essential is happening there. Language arose because we have actual experience to share, however tricky it can be to verbalize. It doesn't work perfectly, and leads to confusion, but here we are, reading and writing.
"Consciousness" may be a word for a slippery concept/experience, but that doesn't equate to questions about consciousness being inherently semantic.