(Feb 23, 2024 04:28 PM)Magical Realist Wrote: [ -> ]I disagree with most of what Dennett proposes--that consciousness is an illusion. I'm pretty sure my consciousness is real and an active and roughly accurate representation of my experience and my world. Just look at what happens when we remove it. Pretty much everything disappears. I mean everything! Even ourselves. That's how "present" and real consciousness is.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qYYFQiN052c
Imagine one avian expert talking about chickens, and another one discussing ducks. However. neither of them specify such with their language, each instead always using the general category of "birds or bird". All sorts of confusion would result, because chickens and ducks have different attributes and habits, despite both slotting under the overarching term of "bird".
That's what happens when philosophers and neuroscientists only refer to "consciousness" rather than narrowing down to what they specifically mean within that umbrella concept.
There are problems of cognition (identification and understanding) which are actually easy because they are amenable to the kind of mechanistic interactions or information processing that AI engages in.
And then there is the problem of experience or manifestation, which stems from matter and its structural and dynamic arrangements having no such capacity even ascribed to it, much less an underlying science that could explain such. Dead people don't just lack presentations of personal thoughts -- the whole world becomes absent as well. That is the normal condition of non-conscious matter and its configurations: It has no evidence of its own existence, no appearances or sensations of any kind (the phenomenal meaning of images, sounds, tactile feelings, odors, etc).
To suggest otherwise about matter is to stray into
panpsychism, which is anathema to the conventional materialist and scientism mindset (i.e., contradiction).
Dennett engages in the straw man of treating words like "mind" and "consciousness" in an antiquated fashion, of treating them as if they denote the "supernatural" or "magic", when the majority of naturalistic philosophers and scientists in this day and age don't load them with anything like that.
Ironically, since we're left with an utterly superficial explanation of phenomenal experience -- that it is brutely conjured when the correct choreographed dance or mechanistic procedures are performed by a system (and even then the product is only privately observable to the system itself), it is actually Dennett who is encouraging magic (i.e., executing the equivalent of a spell is necessary). Other parties would like to have a deeper, decent, alternative explanation that would make sense (even if going against the traditional dogma about matter).
When venturing into the proposition that consciousness (or specifically, phenomenal experience) is an illusion, which Keith Frankish promotes and Dennett seems to advocate -- the idea is inherently self-conflicting. Since "illusion" is a subspecies of experience (it entails the latter), you can't have an erroneous appearance or presentation (illusion) unless such appearances are possible to begin with.
One is left with pondering at least three possibilities with respect to such a school of thought:
(1) That its members are intellectually disingenuous at a fundamental level.
(2) That its members are abysmally stupid.
(3) That they are literally
philosophical zombies.
The first seems unlikely and the second too crude and insensitive to suggest (along with the first).
With respect to the third... I once considered human p-zombies to be too fantastic to be possible. But
aphantasia and
blindsight have changed my mind a bit. Neither maps congruently upon p-zombie, but they suggest a person could lack experiences and yet still be natively wired to insist pretentiously to one's self and others that they do (without actually knowing what a manifestation is, in contrast to the nothingness they abide in).
And if the members are kind of indirectly or quasi-directly hinting themselves that they are a p-zombies, then that also mitigates the potential social callousness of the possibility (or inferring that as the source of their bizarre proposals).
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