Consciousness Trilemma

[Edwardo Piet]

Neo, I think you have to decide whether you're interested in understanding consciousness or interested in constructing an understanding which you think would have the most social utility.

Why can it not be both?

He's not saying it can't be both but the point is to notice that those are two separate questions.

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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.

No, they're not.  See, that Dennet quote is so useful.  

Here's another quote, and a link, so that you can learn about the positions you're constantly tripping over.

Eliminative materialism (also called eliminativism) is the claim that people's common-sense understanding of the mind (or folk psychology) is false and that certain classes of mental states that most people believe in do not exist. It is a materialist position in the philosophy of mind.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eliminative_materialism

I know, I know, it sounds so radical.....that we might have to rethink the notions of mind a bunch of primitives came up with in the absence of nueroscience.  Perish the thought.  Next thing you know cats will marry dogs, the justice system will collapse, people will become amoral monsters, and it will be armageddon..and then, by god, then.....we'll really wish we'd believed in ghosts.

Yeah... to use one of the terms Dennett coined against himself... "Greedy reductionism"... that's what Dennett is doing by saying that qualia is illusory or non-existent.





I'm not a fan of Dennett. He takes the same silly approach both with free will and consciousness. He says his approach is saying that "consciousness does exist it just isn't what you think it is" and "free will does exist it just isn't what you think it is" but then he uses completely different defintiions and basically changes the subject.

His approach is always to sidestep the issue rather than address it head on. He thinks he's being scientific and purifying a definition but he's really not. Scientists address scientific questions but he's basically doing bad philosophy by redefining the terms so as to fail to address the philosophical questions.

Qualia cannot be an illusion. And as for his response to Sam Harris on the matter of free will... like I've said before:

When compatabilists like Dan Dennett says that hard incompatabilists such as Sam Harris are a "compatabilist in everything but name" that's, ironically, a clear knockdown argument against the compatabilist's own statement. It's basically admitting that all compatabilism is is a name. A term "free will" that's used despite having absolutely no difference ontologically from incompatabilism.

In case this isn't clear... look at this analogy:

When compatabilists respond to hard incompatabilists with "You're a compatabilist in everything but name!" that is exactly analogous to a naturalistic pantheist responding to an atheist with "You're a pantheist in everything but name!".

My added bold. This is why Dan Dennett's approach is silly.

And saying it seems like qualia exists but they really don't is as retarded as saying that it seems like squares have four sides or it seems that bachelors are unmarried.

If you seem to be conscious... you're conscious. Without seeming there is no consciousness and without consciousness there is no seeming. It's the same fucking thing. Whether something is or is not the case... if it seems to be the case then that's a matter of it seeming to someone to be the case... i.e. subjectivity i.e. consciousness.