(February 16, 2017 at 9:05 pm)bennyboy Wrote:(February 16, 2017 at 6:23 pm)emjay Wrote: I was just expressing my own confusions; if you want to believe in a homunculous, knock yourself out, but for me it's not a given... all that's given is there's an apparent homunculous. That apparent homunculous is the subject of experience, ie if there is experience there is something to experience it... apparently... but that focal point, of which our senses revolve around, could, in my view, be just another implicit representation in the network, not above and beyond, as a homunculous would be, but the natural inference the network would make when it finds all sensory information, pointing as it were to the same thing.
So you're saying the self is. . . an idea?
Do you anticipate a tough sell here?
Probably best not to use the word idea
as you said it's a term that's easily conflated... to the point where I haven't got a clue what you mean by it 
But if it means a representation, then yeah, I think it's an idea.
Anyway, I wasn't trying to sell anything... just thought dumping my own confusions... which helps me to clarify them. We're probably both too far gone down our respective rabbit holes to ever sell each other anything
Those confusions still remain; what existence means when it is judged in reference to something that may not itself exist as we think it does... and all the rest. And what I really meant to say, but somehow it never really came out in that whole post, was how something could both exist and not exist... in the sense that I don't think of qualia as 'stuff' but at the same time there is change and difference in consciousness... so I just can't get my head around what that implies, especially in an enclosed system, the centre of which (the self) is itself dubious (to me). Basically I'm asking (myself) the question, does qualia exist as the term is defined? And I don't know the answer.
