If the notion of consciousness they're referring to doesn't meet the normal philosophical criteria, then they're essentially just wrong. Which is quite possible - many people seem very confused on the subject, which is not too surprising, especially for scientists who essentially reject philosophy, like Dawkins.
Philosophy doesn't own words afaik. Words have different meaning in different domains.
> many people seem very confused on the subject, which is not too surprising, especially for scientists who essentially reject philosophy, like Dawkins
Or they just use words in a different domain and you didn't notice and now you're angry because what they said didn't make sense. Come now, surely philosophy must handle such trivial cases of linguistic basic knowledge? If now, I'm gonna have to reject philosophy too since it'd be trying to reject a much harder science (linguistics).
The philosophical meaning of consciousness is usually what people are referring to when they talk about consciousness. Can you point to some other commonly used "different meaning" that's being used or intended in these discussions?
> I'm gonna have to reject philosophy too
You'll have lots of intellectually stunted company.
Philosophy isn't even very good at defining words. If you look up 'what is consciousness' in the philosophy section you'll get hundreds of pages of contradictory ideas.
