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Dennett denies his own first person evidence of his own consciousness so that he can sustain his belief that all that exists is the materialistic world view. Mo
by manyoso 10y ago
Dennett denies his own first person evidence of his own consciousness so that he can sustain his belief that all that exists is the materialistic world view. Motivated reasoning in the extreme and completely violating Occam's Razor which is quite ironic.
- ThomPete 10y agofirst person evidence doesen't lead you anywhere. Its a = a, true but quite trivial.
- sdfin 10y agowhat would a 3rd person evidence of consciousness be like?
- jnicholasp 10y agoIt does when the question is, "Does first person evidence exist?"
- ThomPete 10y agoBut that is self evident. The problem is that it doesent lead us anywhere.
- manyoso 10y agoOk, so where does Dennett's view lead that is in anyway more interesting?!
- CuriouslyC 10y agoFirst person evidence obviously does exist (unless I'm responding to a philosophical zombie), the problem is that it is cannot be verified by an outside observer. I suppose you could say that something only becomes evidence when externally verified, but my response to that is that you have no way of knowing if that external verification is real or just a figment of your imagination, so that external verification doesn't really get you anywhere.
- otikik 10y agoYou could very be a philosophical zombie yourself, just one programmed by evolution to experience consciousness. That's the argument as far as I understand it.
- gr33nman 10y agoFirst person evidence is relevant when many people replicate the experiment and get the same result, no? This book makes a compelling argument that scientific progress is currently blocked on major questions by the "Taboo of Subjectivity": http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/1144208.The_Taboo_of_Subjectivity http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/1144208.The_Taboo_of_Subj...
- ThomPete 10y agoNo which is why scientific facts are considered temporary. Also any deep dive into how hard it is to say anything objective is making it very clearly that the only thing fhat block objectivity is the lack of its existence.
- gr33nman 10y agoI agree with your point that objectivity does not exist. Any scientific observation is ultimately a subjective experience. It is only replication of an experiment by others that leads the scientific community to (temporarily) accept it as fact. My point is that there is no reason why we can't apply the scientific method to the subjective experience of our own minds as well.
- danbruc 10y agoI agree with your point that objectivity does not exist. Any scientific observation is ultimately a subjective experience. I don't think the first sentence follows from the second one and I doubt that the second sentence is as strong as you may think. Look at any modern physical experiment, the observations are made by apparatuses and transformed many times before a human sees the result on a screen. How would you argue that you subjectively experiencing numbers on a screen can introduce any [significant] subjectivity into the observed? There is just so much between the observed and the observer. And even if observations would necessarily be subjective, you would have to explain the consistency of observations between different observers across space and time. But I just realize that I am here more arguing for an objective observer-independent reality than for objective observers but I will keep it anyway. I also think the somewhat temporary nature of physics has no large bearing on objectivity. We are well aware of measurement errors and the fact that theories are often just approximations. Better measurements or theories rarely make previous results objectively wrong. But I will acknowledge that especially theories with a lot of interpretations in them have a real risk to turn out wrong.
- otikik 10y agoI believe the counterargument is that subjective personal experience, even when shared by lots of people, doesn't count as evidence. Subjective experience has been proven unreliable well enough through history, even for massively shared cases.