There is no proof that death means no consciousness.

When I say “I am conscious” I am stating that I can see objects distributed in space around me, that I can hear, smell and touch these objects and attend to different aspects of them. A report of a conscious experience can be spoken, written down, or expressed as a set of responses to yes/no questions—for example, when patients communicate by imagining playing tennis or walking around a house in an fMRI scanner (Monti et al., 2010)2. People can be asked to subjectively assess the clarity of their visual experience (Ramsøy and Overgaard, 2004), and their level of awareness of a stimulus can be extracted using indirect measures, such as post-decision wagering (Persaud et al., 2007)3.

When people are not explicitly reporting their consciousness they can still be considered to be conscious on the basis of their external behavior. For example, Shanahan (2010) has argued that enhanced flexibility in the face of novelty and the ability to inwardly execute a sequence of problem-solving steps are a sign of consciousness, and the Glasgow Coma Scale uses motor responsiveness, verbal performance and eye opening to measure the level of consciousness in patients (Teasdale and Jennett, 1974). An overview of some of the different techniques for measuring consciousness is given by Seth et al. (2008).

I will use “c-report” to designate any form of external behavior that is interpreted as a report about the level and/or contents of consciousness. This paper will primarily focus on verbal c-reporting, on the assumption that similar arguments can be applied to any form of behavioral report about consciousness. C-reporting will be interpreted in the fullest possible sense, so that every possible detail of a conscious experience that could be reported will be assumed to be reported.

One of the key problems with c-reporting is that it is hard to obtain accurate detailed descriptions of conscious states. Consciousness changes several times per second and it is altered by the act of c-reporting, so how can we describe it using natural language, which operates on a time scale of seconds? Shanahan (2010) has suggested that this problem could be addressed by resetting our consciousness, so that multiple probes can be run on a single fixed state (see section Platinum Standard Systems). People can also be trained to make more accurate reports about their consciousness (Lutz et al., 2002), and there has been a substantial amount of work on the use of interviews to help people describe their conscious states4. These problems have led to a debate about the extent to which we can generate accurate descriptions of our consciousness (Hurlburt and Schwitzgebel, 2007).
C-reports are typically transformed into natural language descriptions of a state of consciousness. However, natural language is not ideal for describing consciousness because it is context-dependent, ambiguous and it cannot be used to describe the experiences of non-human systems (Chrisley, 1995). It is also difficult to see how natural language descriptions could be incorporated into mathematical theories of consciousness. One way of addressing these problems would be to use a tightly structured formal language to describe consciousness (Gamez, 2006). Chrisley (1995) has made some suggestions about how consciousness can be described using robotic systems, although it is not clear to what extent these proposals could be play a role in a mathematical theory of consciousness.

Measurement of Unconscious Information (Uc-Reports)

The absence of a c-report about the level and/or contents of consciousness is typically taken as a sign that a person is unconscious or that a particular piece of information in the brain is unconscious. People can also make deliberate reports of unconscious mental content. For example, forced choice guessing is used in psychology experiments to measure unconscious mental content and visually guided reaching behavior in blindsight patients is interpreted as a sign that they have access to unconscious visual information. Galvanic skin responses can indicate that information is being processed unconsciously (Kotze and Moller, 1990) and priming effects can be used to determine if words are being processed unconsciously—for example, Merikle and Daneman (1996) played words to patients under general anesthesia and found that when they were awake they often completed word stems with words that they had heard unconsciously.
All of these types of unconscious reporting will be referred to as “uc-reports,” which are any form of positive or negative behavioral output that is interpreted as the absence of consciousness or the presence of unconscious information. While there will inevitably be gray areas between c-reports and uc-reports, it will be assumed that there are enough clear examples of both types to justify the distinction in this paper.

1. Pro must explain how consciousness at all is proven or alternatively has to take the stance that consciousness itself isn't proven at all, Pro has decided to take neither stance so Con in Round 3 had to fight both angles at once.
   
2. When we analyse how to prove consciousness being present, we realise that dead bodies lack any and all signs of consciousness, which is de factor proof of lack-of-proof-of consciousness.