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Consciousness, like intelligence and many others, is a prescientific term, and most debates about 'the nature of consciousness' (et al) are really just debates
by rvense 3y ago
Consciousness, like intelligence and many others, is a prescientific term, and most debates about 'the nature of consciousness' (et al) are really just debates about the definition of the term.
- goatlover 3y agoIt's not a definitional problem, otherwise Chalmers wouldn't have won the bet. Philosophers are very adept with concepts. The problem is experiential in nature. We experience a world of color, sound, tastes/smells, feels, emotions in perception, imagination, memory, dreaming, internal dialog, hallucination, illusion. But we describe the world in terms that are objective, functional and mathematical, not experiential. The sensations are abstracted away because they are creature-specific, and vary among individuals. The room feels cold to you, hot to me, and normal to a third person. But we can describe the molecular motion of air in the room, and measure the temperature, which is the same for all people and creatures. As Thomas Nagel put it, science is the view from nowhere. There is nothing experiential about the physical understanding of the world. And yet we are part of that world.