Consciousness Trilemma

[bennyboy]

I'm going to have to take a break from this thread and find some good sources on this.  My interest is piqued enough to track down some serious literature on it.

Okay, I'm back. I've read the wikipedia page on eliminativism, which I think gives me a pretty good idea what it's about.

I happen to admire B.F. Skinner, who very much contributed to pulling psychology out of the bullshit of Freudian interpretive psychology and into the realm of science. You can apply some of his techniques on animals, even on some kinds of cells, and right down to ANNs. In fact, maybe we should say that B.F. Skinner is one of the founders of AI.

That being said, it seems to me that many material eliminativists are picking the philosophical cherry. For example, Dennet may not accept that you can say qualia really exist-- and yet he carries on as though conscious agency in other exist. Many have said that the sense of self is illusory (in this thread, I believe)-- that there's no such thing as "self" to be found-- no center for subjective agency.

But here's my question for you-- how do you not ride this same view right down to solipsism or even further? NO category of subjective mental function can be mapped onto material reality; that's why we can't determine whether any given physical system allows for consciousness (defined as the awareness of qualia, say) to exist, and why I've said in the past that the study of mind (again, defined as the subjective experience of sensations and ideas) is outside the reach of science (if it is science being honestly and properly done). I've said that you can study brain function and behaviors, but NOT mind, which cannot be shown even to exist.

My problem with you and Dennet and others isn't that you go too far, but not far enough. You, for example, have consistently insisted on the existence of other-mind, even under the definition of mind as the subjective experience of sensation and ideas (later, we started using the word qualia), despite our obvious inability to locate subjective agency in an objective Universe.

My unwillingness to do so has been largely responsible for my identifying as "agnostic" and why I've also mentioned "truth-in-context" so often. In the context of a universe in which others can actually experience pain, it is true for me that harming others for fun is wrong. In the context of a universe in which others are not accepted as anything more that philosophical zombies, then the term "harm" has no real meaning that matters morally, and I can eat babies for breakfast with a clean conscience.