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I found Metzinger’s ‘The ego tunnel’ immensely helpful in identifying the constituent parts that we mean by consciousness. Everything the physicist Sean Carrol

I found Metzinger’s ‘The ego tunnel’ immensely helpful in identifying the constituent parts that we mean by consciousness. Everything the physicist Sean Carroll says about consciousness rings true to me. It is only an illusion in the same way the 2nd law of thermodynamics is an illusion built from particle interaction and statistics.

lisper 8y ago
> the 2nd law of thermodynamics is an illusion That is an excellent analogy. Perhaps "emergent property" would be a better term for both, but even that phrase doesn't quite capture the true spirit of Dennett's argument. It's not just the consciousness is emergent, it's that its true nature is actually very different from what we think it is.
- naasking 8y ago
  It's an illusion in a similar way that multitasking on a single CPU is an illusion.
  - hackinthebochs 8y ago
    And yet, given some time interval, all threads do make progress within that interval (assuming its not too small of course). So if by multitasking we mean that execution of multiple threads progresses over time, then multitasking on a single CPU is real. The point is that one's perspective is relevant to what's correctly taken as real. But what is the perspective of neural circuitry's acquaintance with neural circuitry? I don't know, but I know its not like our third person acquaintance with neural circuitry. And so saying phenomenal experience is an illusion of neural circuitry (and thus not real) is a mistake. It's like saying heat isn't real, only energetic particles are real, despite the fact that I just got burned by my hot pan.
    - naasking 8y ago
      You're correct, it's more correct to say it's an illusion of parallelism. On human timescales the parallelism appears real but it's really not. > It's like saying heat isn't real, only energetic particles are real, despite the fact that I just got burned by my hot pan Which is true, heat isn't real, just like my car isn't real. These are labels we apply to loose macroscopic phenomena. And so it is with consciousness. At some level of abstraction, we can certainly talk about consciousness as something real since it's clearly a phenomenon requiring explication, but the "real" we're talking about in this sort of debate is some irreducible metaphysical existence, such as that posited by dualism.
      - hackinthebochs 8y ago
        >but the "real" we're talking about in this sort of debate is some irreducible metaphysical existence, such as that posited by dualism. But this seems like a mistake. When someone like Dennett says that phenomenal consciousness doesn't exist, it seems like he's denying the reality of the appearances of phenomenal experience. That is, we say that phenomenal experience seems a certain way to us, but Dennett counters that this appearance is false. Denying the reality of the appearances of phenomenal experience is denying the existence of what most people take as the explanandum in this debate. But there's a difference between denying a theory of the nature of a phenomena and denying the phenomena. We can say that phenomenal experience aren't irreducibly fundamental and not deny the existence of phenomenal experience. But illusion talk denies the phenomena, it's not merely saying it doesn't have a fundamental existence.
        naasking 8y ago
        > But illusion talk denies the phenomena, it's not merely saying it doesn't have a fundamental existence. I don't see how. An illusion is a perception entailing a false conclusion when taken at face value. The perception clearly exists, but what it entails is the illusion. Qualia would then fall under the same category as other perceptive illusions, like optical illusions: https://pixabay.com/en/pencil-bent-pencil-pencil-in-water-2403662/ https://pixabay.com/en/pencil-bent-pencil-pencil-in-water-24... Just so we're clear, when you say "appearance of phenomenal experience", I read, "the entailment of a perception". And it seems perfectly sensible to say that the entailments of perceptions can and often are false.
- SteveJS 8y ago
  The term Carroll uses is a weakly emergent property. You can watch both dennett, carroll and others discuss here: https://www.preposterousuniverse.com/naturalism2012/ https://www.preposterousuniverse.com/naturalism2012/
arbitrage 8y ago
So ... not an illusion at all, then?

lisper 8y ago

> the 2nd law of thermodynamics is an illusion That is an excellent analogy. Perhaps "emergent property" would be a better term for both, but even that phrase doesn't quite capture the true spirit of Dennett's argument. It's not just the consciousness is emergent, it's that its true nature is actually very different from what we think it is.

naasking 8y ago
It's an illusion in a similar way that multitasking on a single CPU is an illusion.
- hackinthebochs 8y ago
  And yet, given some time interval, all threads do make progress within that interval (assuming its not too small of course). So if by multitasking we mean that execution of multiple threads progresses over time, then multitasking on a single CPU is real. The point is that one's perspective is relevant to what's correctly taken as real. But what is the perspective of neural circuitry's acquaintance with neural circuitry? I don't know, but I know its not like our third person acquaintance with neural circuitry. And so saying phenomenal experience is an illusion of neural circuitry (and thus not real) is a mistake. It's like saying heat isn't real, only energetic particles are real, despite the fact that I just got burned by my hot pan.
  - naasking 8y ago
    You're correct, it's more correct to say it's an illusion of parallelism. On human timescales the parallelism appears real but it's really not. > It's like saying heat isn't real, only energetic particles are real, despite the fact that I just got burned by my hot pan Which is true, heat isn't real, just like my car isn't real. These are labels we apply to loose macroscopic phenomena. And so it is with consciousness. At some level of abstraction, we can certainly talk about consciousness as something real since it's clearly a phenomenon requiring explication, but the "real" we're talking about in this sort of debate is some irreducible metaphysical existence, such as that posited by dualism.
    - hackinthebochs 8y ago
      >but the "real" we're talking about in this sort of debate is some irreducible metaphysical existence, such as that posited by dualism. But this seems like a mistake. When someone like Dennett says that phenomenal consciousness doesn't exist, it seems like he's denying the reality of the appearances of phenomenal experience. That is, we say that phenomenal experience seems a certain way to us, but Dennett counters that this appearance is false. Denying the reality of the appearances of phenomenal experience is denying the existence of what most people take as the explanandum in this debate. But there's a difference between denying a theory of the nature of a phenomena and denying the phenomena. We can say that phenomenal experience aren't irreducibly fundamental and not deny the existence of phenomenal experience. But illusion talk denies the phenomena, it's not merely saying it doesn't have a fundamental existence.
      - naasking 8y ago
        > But illusion talk denies the phenomena, it's not merely saying it doesn't have a fundamental existence. I don't see how. An illusion is a perception entailing a false conclusion when taken at face value. The perception clearly exists, but what it entails is the illusion. Qualia would then fall under the same category as other perceptive illusions, like optical illusions: https://pixabay.com/en/pencil-bent-pencil-pencil-in-water-2403662/ https://pixabay.com/en/pencil-bent-pencil-pencil-in-water-24... Just so we're clear, when you say "appearance of phenomenal experience", I read, "the entailment of a perception". And it seems perfectly sensible to say that the entailments of perceptions can and often are false.
SteveJS 8y ago
The term Carroll uses is a weakly emergent property. You can watch both dennett, carroll and others discuss here: https://www.preposterousuniverse.com/naturalism2012/ https://www.preposterousuniverse.com/naturalism2012/

arbitrage 8y ago

So ... not an illusion at all, then?