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I went to grad school to study the neuroscientific basis of consciousness, and this paper is a classic. It inspired one of the weirder conference sessions I've
by KingMob 10y ago
I went to grad school to study the neuroscientific basis of consciousness, and this paper is a classic. It inspired one of the weirder conference sessions I've ever been to at ASSC, called "Is a fish conscious?"
Imagine a room full of philosophers and scientists arguing vociferously to determine where (or even if) to draw the line between conscious/unconscious organisms. (E.g., fish=probably, bacteria, probably not?)
- ilugaslifg 10y agoEven having that argument in the first place is basically crypto-dualism. The idea that there is objectively such a distinction is 100% reducible to any other attempt to assert that some definitional dichotomy "actually exists". It's exactly isomorphic to any other argument about taste. What is a sandwich, what is a car. An argument about whether a fetish is hot, between a person who has it and a person who doesn't. It's all the same damn thing. Shit like that is why I hadn't stop taking philosophy courses in university. It was just rehashing what always came down to this exact same essentially platonist theory of forms bullshit, over and over and over.
- CuriouslyC 10y agoA large part of the problem is that people don't all agree on the definition of consciousness. It ranges anywhere from the property of having an internal experience (which I subscribe to) all the way to self awareness, and even to the ability for rational thought. This - and arguments over the definition of "is" - were the reason I stopped reading philosophy of mind papers.