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It's not clear to me what it would even mean for "consciousness to turn out to be false." The way consciousness is commonly defined (i.e. not with an analytical

It's not clear to me what it would even mean for "consciousness to turn out to be false." The way consciousness is commonly defined (i.e. not with an analytical definition), its existence as a phenomenon can't be false - only our explanations for what it is and how it works. It would be analogous to telling a physicist trying to provide an explanation for why objects fall to the ground that it might simply turn out to be false that objects fall to the ground at all. That doesn't make sense, because the exploration started with an observable phenomenon.

kanzure 10y ago
> It would be analogous to telling a physicist trying to provide an explanation for why objects fall to the ground that it might simply turn out to be false that objects fall to the ground at all. It is false. Gravity is not about "ground" nor does it require that everything fall to the ground, indeed there seem to be forces on objects stronger than the force of gravity. The ability to falsify concepts is critically important in many branches of epistemology. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Falsifiability https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Falsifiability https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gravity https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gravity
- goatlover 10y ago
  I think you missed the point you were replying to. That objects fall to the ground is an undeniable observation. Having conscious experiences falls into the same category. For that matter, we experience objects falling to the ground. Gravity is an explanation of our experiences of falling objects. The experience comes first, then the explanation. If there was no experience of falling, there would be no explanation of gravity.
  - lmcinnes 10y ago
    I think he grasped the point. The trick here is reframing. Someone says "objects fall to the ground is an undeniable observation", and the other responds "No, your looking at it the wrong way; objects do something but you just think that's falling to the ground, in practice it's something else that has the appearance of falling to the ground". The responder isn't denying your observations, they are denying your interpretation of what you've seen. The same applies to eliminitavists. They aren't denying that something happens that feels to you like experience, they are suggesting, however, that it may not be the thing that you think it is. They'll often point to people's own misunderstandings of their consciousness as examples that we can, in fact, actually be wrong about our own first person experiences. One example of this is the fact that we think we experience full field colour vision. In practice we have colour vision only in a narrow field in the center of our full visual field. You can perform experiments on yourself to demonstrate that this is in fact true. Another example is the sense of continuity to consciousness, which again, can be demonstrated to actually be false. If our "consciousness" is sufficiently different in reality from what we normally presume to be consciousness then, in some real sense, consciousness as we commonly think of it indeed doesn't exist. That doesn't mean there is nothing, just that calling it consciousness with all the associations that implies is perhaps sufficiently misleading as to be wrong.

kanzure 10y ago

> It would be analogous to telling a physicist trying to provide an explanation for why objects fall to the ground that it might simply turn out to be false that objects fall to the ground at all. It is false. Gravity is not about "ground" nor does it require that everything fall to the ground, indeed there seem to be forces on objects stronger than the force of gravity. The ability to falsify concepts is critically important in many branches of epistemology. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Falsifiability https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Falsifiability https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gravity https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gravity

goatlover 10y ago
I think you missed the point you were replying to. That objects fall to the ground is an undeniable observation. Having conscious experiences falls into the same category. For that matter, we experience objects falling to the ground. Gravity is an explanation of our experiences of falling objects. The experience comes first, then the explanation. If there was no experience of falling, there would be no explanation of gravity.
- lmcinnes 10y ago
  I think he grasped the point. The trick here is reframing. Someone says "objects fall to the ground is an undeniable observation", and the other responds "No, your looking at it the wrong way; objects do something but you just think that's falling to the ground, in practice it's something else that has the appearance of falling to the ground". The responder isn't denying your observations, they are denying your interpretation of what you've seen. The same applies to eliminitavists. They aren't denying that something happens that feels to you like experience, they are suggesting, however, that it may not be the thing that you think it is. They'll often point to people's own misunderstandings of their consciousness as examples that we can, in fact, actually be wrong about our own first person experiences. One example of this is the fact that we think we experience full field colour vision. In practice we have colour vision only in a narrow field in the center of our full visual field. You can perform experiments on yourself to demonstrate that this is in fact true. Another example is the sense of continuity to consciousness, which again, can be demonstrated to actually be false. If our "consciousness" is sufficiently different in reality from what we normally presume to be consciousness then, in some real sense, consciousness as we commonly think of it indeed doesn't exist. That doesn't mean there is nothing, just that calling it consciousness with all the associations that implies is perhaps sufficiently misleading as to be wrong.