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>There's a gap between accepting that the mind is ultimately made up of neurons firing and what it feels like to be a mind made up of neurons firing. This is e

• jhickok 2y ago
  I think this (qualia) is certainly the heart of the issue, and I personally go back and forth from some kind of quietism (or some kind of mysterianism), and some kind of illusionism. The latter position I would have found utterly topic-changing for the better part of 2 decades, but now I am finding it more plausible as I lose confidence in first-person reports and a series of related phenomena (documented by people like Eric Schwitzgebel). I'll also add the eliminative materialism is probably not the precise position to describe his views on consciousness. You could be the polar opposite of Dennett, like a Jerry Fodor, and still be a staunch anti-realist about consciousness (a view that I think Fodor even entertained). I take EM to be an assault on folk psychology, which may or may not include qualia, and illusionism is probably the better term for his position on qualia.
  • andoando 2y ago
    Funny enough I completely agree with the eliminative take that folk psychology can be reduced to physical processes. I dont think beliefs, desires, hopes and dreams are all require any kind of consciousness. Where I disagree completely is qualia. Dennet makes some arguments about how any attribute/description we can ascribe to qualia is contradictory. As I see it, a failure to describe it with language has no bearing on the fact that it exists as a mental phenomenona.
    • jhickok 2y ago
      I've long-described myself as an eliminativist about everything but consciousness :) I think there were some really interesting attempts to save classic architectures that were purpose-built to save the folk conception (https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/book/10.1002/9781444310498 https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/book/10.1002/97814443104...), but ultimately I think we don't have the sort of neural architectures that support such a view. Out of curiosity, have you read any of the newer attempts to vindicate the view that most now call illusionism? I doubt you will find it compelling, but leastwise it serves as an update with some pretty new arguments and fresh blood. You might find it amusing: https://philarchive.org/archive/KAMHCY-2 https://philarchive.org/archive/KAMHCY-2
      • andoando 2y ago
        Thanks for the link. Do you understand what they mean by "normative" pain? I cant make sense of it. The first argument given for illusionism is merely stating physical processes are strongly anagaolous to mental pheneomena. Ok agreed, but this is equivalently supports a panpsychic view. It just states "if one adds anomalousness as a premise for illusion, and then further assumes that illusionism is a possibility, then we have strong evidence of illuionism". Huh?? Cant one make the exact same argument for panpschyism? If one adds a premise that physical properties are anomalousness with conscious experiences, and then one supposes that the possibility of panpsychism is evidence for panpsychism then we ought to believe in panpsychism. Besides, what about a synonymous relationship between two things denotes one is illusionary and a product of the other? All this does is show that a singular criteria of illusion is met. The second argument is even more bizarre. It starts with the premise that consciousness/conscious phenomena can be explained fully by physical properties (but not right now, but science will obviously explain it surely, one day). Is this so obviously true that zero words are given to it's justification? Then the rest of the article is an argument to how one cannot treat the "obviousness" of experience so casually... It doesnt seem to me that illusionists actually deny conscious phenomena. More so, they call it an "illusion" and claim this makes the hard problem equivalent to the easy problem. i.e it becomes reducible to giving it a physical explanation. But if all is meant by "its an illusion" is "its really just a physical process", it doesnt grant any useful pathway. It seems very circular. All this makes me really wonder if some of us truly are p zombies and thst the illusionists have managed to figure out a test for it.
• haswell 2y ago
  I should add that I’m agnostic as to the actual reality of things, and a perspective that has felt useful to me is to remind myself that the fields of science are a map, and that there are portions of the map that are just completely undefined. We know there’s a terrain to explore, but haven’t made much progress in increasing the fidelity of that portion of the map. What I do know is that the fundamental Christian version of beliefs leaves a particularly shaped imprint on the psyche, and my relationship with what I thought myself to be started shifting/expanding when I started diving deeper into these unexamined “mystical” notions and having those notions confront the scientific view. That confrontation is what leaves me agnostic. As the map gets better and better, it’s seen as more and more acceptable to look at that map as if it provides ultimate answers. But it still has nothing to tell us about primordial existence. Consciousness sits in the same category of unexplained and possibly unexplainable. Who knows. Maybe all matter truly is conscious and the spectrum of available conscious states scales with the complexity of the matter’s configuration. In either case, I don’t feel that a purely mechanical explanation is necessarily relevant to the question people often claim it answers. Looks like a good thread. Thanks.