(May 24, 2017 at 9:36 pm)bennyboy Wrote:(May 24, 2017 at 9:10 pm)Neo-Scholastic Wrote: In the most extreme case it is a complete lack of experience, which Jor for instance does not hold apparently. One level down from that is the idea that consciousness isn't anything at all - more like the center of gravity in statics, a fictional point from which to calculate force vectors.
Oh. That sounds like word salad to me. The word "consciousness" is about something-- and you don't have to be able to define exactly WHAT that something is when you open your eyes in the morning and become aware that you are experiencing things. You can't really call labels illusions; you can only call our perceptions of whatever we made the label for mistaken.
I wouldn't call that position, eliminative materialism, word salad. I just think it is incoherent, an empirical argument leveled against empiricism. The eliminativists are basically saying that the experiences of observers who don't actually exist aren't really about anything.