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Rationally I feel like we have to accept a Daniel Dennett view: with what we know about the brain, all human behaviour is consistent with the laws of physics, a

Rationally I feel like we have to accept a Daniel Dennett view: with what we know about the brain, all human behaviour is consistent with the laws of physics, and changing the brain very much changes "what it's like" to be - it doesn't take very many experiences with drugs, even alcohol, to realize this. Consciousness, then, has no explanatory power whatsoever. A lot of people argue at this point, but they have nothing substantial to stand on. Maybe they just want to believe that Free Will is something special. However, I think the Hard Problem is a knot that can never go away. I notice physicists are willing to explain much of the properties of the universe (like time having a direction) just by saying there was a very specific initial condition, a very low entropy state that (by definition) is extraordinarily unlikely. So what about saying there's another constraint on conditions of the universe, where we have physical laws that create consciousness. Is this just an anthropic principle of some sort? I was listening to Sean Carroll's "The Big Picture" audiobook. He argues that I can't really be sure I'm not a p-zombie. But I think I can: I'm with Descartes on this one - it's the one thing I actually _can_ be sure of. I'm sure I have an inner experience (that explains nothing scientifically to anyone else) but I can easily imagine not having it, with no change to the laws of physics. Does anyone know of a good read that isn't full of jargon that fleshes out these ideas some more?

mcguire 10y ago
Did Dennett back off from his intentional stance? Consciousness seems important to explain and predict behavior in practice.
- Almaviva 10y ago
  I wasn't clear, it's vitally important to predict behaviour in practice at a poetic naturalism level, but there seems to be no reason to adopt strong emergence: consciousness doesn't introduce any new explanatory power that couldn't, in principle, be explained by physics, or even chemistry, biology and so forth. See Dennett's interview with Bob Wright starting at about 30 minutes: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ss0aCWpNzSM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ss0aCWpNzSM I'm just not ready to stop there, despite this all being true, I think it seems not parsimonious to believe there is nothing fundamentally mysterious about how I feel like something subjectively.
  - mcguire 10y ago
    It's been a while, but... Biology doesn't introduce any explanatory power that couldn't, in principle, be done by chemistry. Likewise, chemistry and physics. But they ain't nobody as is gonna work out the mating behavior of tree frogs from quantum mechanical first principles. That was, I thought, the point of the intentional stance: if you assume consciousness, you get a good model to understand behavior; if you don't, you may, in principle, be able to get a good model but you have a much greater distance to go.

mcguire 10y ago

Did Dennett back off from his intentional stance? Consciousness seems important to explain and predict behavior in practice.

Almaviva 10y ago
I wasn't clear, it's vitally important to predict behaviour in practice at a poetic naturalism level, but there seems to be no reason to adopt strong emergence: consciousness doesn't introduce any new explanatory power that couldn't, in principle, be explained by physics, or even chemistry, biology and so forth. See Dennett's interview with Bob Wright starting at about 30 minutes: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ss0aCWpNzSM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ss0aCWpNzSM I'm just not ready to stop there, despite this all being true, I think it seems not parsimonious to believe there is nothing fundamentally mysterious about how I feel like something subjectively.
- mcguire 10y ago
  It's been a while, but... Biology doesn't introduce any explanatory power that couldn't, in principle, be done by chemistry. Likewise, chemistry and physics. But they ain't nobody as is gonna work out the mating behavior of tree frogs from quantum mechanical first principles. That was, I thought, the point of the intentional stance: if you assume consciousness, you get a good model to understand behavior; if you don't, you may, in principle, be able to get a good model but you have a much greater distance to go.