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Total claptrap There are various intelligible rejections of the hard problem; Anil Seth's "Beast Machines", Colin McGinn's "Mysternianism", and Giulio Tononi's

Total claptrap There are various intelligible rejections of the hard problem; Anil Seth's "Beast Machines", Colin McGinn's "Mysternianism", and Giulio Tononi's "Integrated Information Theory", all come to mind. None are completely satisfying or widely held, all are try to strike a balance between the problems of effective materialism and the more woo-woo frames of idealism and panpsychism (or, commonly, go hard to one end of the scale). None, not a single one, not from the people who think a billet of 304 stainless steel has feelings or the ones who think the human mind isn't meaningfully differentiated from that billet in its cold unfeeling nature, tries to so fully reject our materialist knowledge of the physical world and regress into this literally medieval understanding. The author may be experiencing an unbalancing of the humours.

empath75 2y ago
Yeah, his resolution to the problem is him saying "nuh-uh" in a very long winded way. Sure if you just completely abandon any attempt to explain or understand things, a lot of difficult problems evaporate. But you're not "contributing" by doing that, you've just declared that you aren't interested. And also, he rather coyly avoids stating what his actual beliefs are -- he's a traditional catholic, so his actual explanation is going to be something like a soul. (https://edwardfeser.blogspot.com/2012/03/what-is-soul.html https://edwardfeser.blogspot.com/2012/03/what-is-soul.html)
- nickelpro 2y ago
  I got as much from his sidebar, but even without it's obvious from the way he writes about the hard problem. Only the faithful bring up Descartes and dualism with a straight face (not so much as a knowingly raised eyebrow for the audience), or make arguments like "this is how things are naturally phrased in English, therefore that must be how they literally, ontologically, are."
Vecr 2y ago
In your (apparently well researched) opinion, is this post more or less intelligible than R. S. Bakker's "The Last Magic Show"/Blind Brain Theory? This one has less wacky diagrams, and also is more vague and thus less easily falsifiable. On the other hand apparently there's a soul involved.
- nickelpro 2y ago
  Bakker's concepts, insomuch as they can be defined and I have an understanding of what he tried to define, represent the conclusions of Daniel Dennett's "user illusion" via the mechanisms of Hofstadter's strange loop. Both ideas are better discussed by their original authors than Bakker's strange bootleg. This post's philosophical soup is somehow even less convincing and coherent than Bakker.

empath75 2y ago

Yeah, his resolution to the problem is him saying "nuh-uh" in a very long winded way. Sure if you just completely abandon any attempt to explain or understand things, a lot of difficult problems evaporate. But you're not "contributing" by doing that, you've just declared that you aren't interested. And also, he rather coyly avoids stating what his actual beliefs are -- he's a traditional catholic, so his actual explanation is going to be something like a soul. (https://edwardfeser.blogspot.com/2012/03/what-is-soul.html https://edwardfeser.blogspot.com/2012/03/what-is-soul.html)

nickelpro 2y ago
I got as much from his sidebar, but even without it's obvious from the way he writes about the hard problem. Only the faithful bring up Descartes and dualism with a straight face (not so much as a knowingly raised eyebrow for the audience), or make arguments like "this is how things are naturally phrased in English, therefore that must be how they literally, ontologically, are."

Vecr 2y ago

In your (apparently well researched) opinion, is this post more or less intelligible than R. S. Bakker's "The Last Magic Show"/Blind Brain Theory? This one has less wacky diagrams, and also is more vague and thus less easily falsifiable. On the other hand apparently there's a soul involved.

nickelpro 2y ago
Bakker's concepts, insomuch as they can be defined and I have an understanding of what he tried to define, represent the conclusions of Daniel Dennett's "user illusion" via the mechanisms of Hofstadter's strange loop. Both ideas are better discussed by their original authors than Bakker's strange bootleg. This post's philosophical soup is somehow even less convincing and coherent than Bakker.