In the US, we have redefined a lot of our "cars" to be "trucks" instead so they don't have to meet cafe standards.
replyYou really don't have much experience in philosophy of language do you? It's notoriously hard to pin down the edges of such terms, even something like car or table.
replyIs a Reliant Robin a car or a tricycle? If it's a car, why aren't other tricycles? What about a side-car of a motorcycle? What about an APC? What's the distinction between a flying car and a plane?
It's hard to pin down the edges of any term, but there exist things which are car-like and yet universally agreed not to be cars. That's what I claim doesn't exist for consciousness.
replyDescribing something as "car-like" is begging the question. You are presupposing an objective definition for "car" in order to draw a distinction between things that are cars, and things that are almost cars. The reason such a thing doesn't exist for consciousness is that people believe that the offered definitions for consciousness are illegitimate. It would seem logically weird for me to accept that a term is "real" if it crosses some percentage of public acceptance of the definition, and not real otherwise. I would argue that using that heuristic would make it very obvious that computers are not conscious because it's a stance that practically everybody takes outside of hackernews.
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