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Consciousness is identical to the presence of qualia, that there is something rather than nothing, that the lights are on. ‘Reductive’ means the assumption tha
by GPerson 2mo ago
Consciousness is identical to the presence of qualia, that there is something rather than nothing, that the lights are on.
‘Reductive’ means the assumption that all phenomena reduce to what represent them in an external model or linguistic description.
Science, language, and reason are fundamentally reductive. So in practice the reductive assumption is just denying that things have an existence which is not identical to our models of them. And since these are the respected modes of thought most people are unaware that they are committing to a non-trivial reductive assumption when reasoning about consciousness.
- arde 2mo agoThe problem with non-reductive definitions such as the one you just gave there is that they don't have much information at all. What are those "lights" that are on when you say there is consciousness, apart from the presence of consciousness itself, the same thing that should be defined by that phrase? The presence of qualia is only possible, by definition, when there is already a consciousness that experiments them, but what is this? What is that something that you contrast with nothing, and how is it different from any other somethings like rocks, if at all? That just avoids defining at all.