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> people who think that consciousness is not a hard problem are P-Zombies that can't experience the problem I've come to the same conclusion. Meaning no disre
by carapace 5y ago
> people who think that consciousness is not a hard problem are P-Zombies that can't experience the problem
I've come to the same conclusion. Meaning no disrespect or insult to them, it seems to me that it must be the case that some folks just haven't noticed themselves.
P.D. Ouspensky talks about learning to "remember myself" in "In Search of the Miraculous" and describes how it was for him to practice changing from thinking one is self-aware to actually becoming self-aware moment-to-moment. There's a passage...
> Two hours later I woke up in the Tavricheskaya, that is, far away. I was going by izvostchik to the printers. The sensation of awakening was extraordinarily vivid. I can almost say that I came to. I remembered everything at once. How I had been walking along the Nadejdinskaya, how I had been remembering myself, how I had thought about cigarettes, and how at this thought I seemed all at once to fall and disappear into a deep sleep.
I suspect people who think that consciousness is not a hard problem must be still "asleep" in this sense, effectively P-Zombies, although the potential is there to become self-aware beings.
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> as a materialist, I have a really hard time accepting that my self/experience can't be explained materialistically.
Okay, fair enough, but then you have the infinite regress problem. How do you explain material itself materialistically?
- ncmncm 5y ago> "some folks just haven't noticed themselves" Some folks don't enjoy tying themselves in knots. You are absolutely welcome to spend your precious seconds of limited life on it, but it doesn't make you superior, however much you would like to think it does. It's just a choice, like between working and playing.
- carapace 5y agoI didn't say anything about "superior". Is being a "P-Zombie" inferior to being self-aware? By what metric could such a comparison be made? Is the water inferior to the wave? Also, "tying themselves in knots" != "noticed themselves", if anything it's the opposite: all knots untie.
- ncmncm 5y agoAll knots can be untied, if that is what you choose to do. But not everybody chooses that. Thus far you have not chosen that. "Noticing yourself" is something literally everyone does. Not everyone ties themselves in knots. The alternative to tying yourself in knots is to think clearly without inventing falsehoods. "P-zombies" is just another word for solipsism. The moment somebody proposes either, you know there will be no more clear thought.
- psyc 5y agoThis is such a non-sequitur. I can't tell if you're referring to people choosing not to be conscious (I doubt that's possible) or choosing not to ponder on it (I don't think that's relevant). If people don't want to think about it, that's easily avoided. What we're talking about is people expending serious thought, "tying themselves in knots" as you say, to write essays and sometimes tomes dissuading others from pondering it either because "there's no hard problem" or "it's not productive."
- ncmncm 5y agoI am talking about choosing to tie yourself in knots and thereby preventing any further progress toward understanding what you are talking about. You could also choose not to tie yourself in knots, and then you would not be blocked, and could begin to make sense.
- psyc 5y agoThat makes more sense, thanks. But philosophers of mind, neuroscientists, cognitive scientists, and all could just as well pursue other lines of inquiry without protesting too much that there's no hard problem.
- ncmncm 5y agoIf you think there is a hard problem, it is on you to articulate one. Thus far I have not encountered one that does not depend on undefined words or circular arguments, i.e. knots.
- rytill 5y agoDo you think there is such a thing as objective morality? Not just human ethics, or social norms or whatever, but that some things that occur are "better" than other things in some important sense. Or maybe, that certain actions are "good" and others are "bad"? Like for instance, the experience a human would have when relaxing in a hot tub with their friends, is "better" in some important, real sense compared to the experience of dying in a trench in WWI? If not, I probably can't convince you that there is a hard problem having to do with consciousness where we'd benefit from knowing all the answers. But if so, I could give it a try.