The Philosophy of Mind: Zombies, "radical emergence" and evidence of non-experiential

[Edwardo Piet]

Realtime control of decisions is not a requirement for usefulness.  I would suggest that you consider the benefits of reflective observation, memory, and long term planning..which don't necessarily inform our immediate actions, but have a cumulative baseline setting effect on future action.

They're all predetermined by prior unconscious causes, including unconscious aspects to the brain (as the experiments showed).

This 'control' you speak of... isn't control.

I think it's important to focus on the things we don't disagree about in a conversation about disagreement.

Fair enough but don't tell me I agree with things I clearly disagree with. If you can't spot the disagreement, that's not my problem.

   You and I both agree that there are a range of potential biological solutions to specific problems. 

So we both agree on something incredibly vague and trivally true that isn't even worse discussing you mean? The response to that is "DUH who doesn't?". Besides maybe a creationist.

You and I agree that there may be other ways that some behavior x is achieved.

Another incredibly vague trivially true and completely pointless point.

  We do not agree on this summary of potential biological solutions and functional alternatives to consciousness as indicative of the uselessness of x.

True, and that part is actually interesting and non-trivial. And my point is my position has evidence to back it up. I've also made a bunch of arguments, none of which you have addressed. All you do is strawman your opponent.  

Is your support for this limited to being useful at realtime decisionmaking? 

What decision making? Do you mean the illusion of decision making? That's something that really is an illusion.

I agree that this is an interesting subject, we agree that consciousness plays far less of a role in that than it seems, or that we expected to find.

It doesn't seem to play ANY role on our actual behavior... as the experiments show.

I'm cautioning against defining evolutionary utility so narrowly. 

Okay so here's the part where you make a blanket statement about me defining it narrowly when I never even defined it at all. We are both well aware that it's about genes maintaining and replicating themselves, we know how natural selection works. The point is that whilst it's not impossible for consciousness to be useful there's absolutely no evidence that it is, and yet there is evidence to the contrary and scientific evidence at that.

Why is it that arguing with you always seems to be a complete waste of time? Oh yeah, because every single time I make a point you don't even address it.

Crap analogy. Scientific experiments don't show that flight or wings have no benefit.

We come to the first special pleading case.  Wing/flight is somehow different from brain/mind.

Do I just need to repeat what I already said? I just said it's a crap analogy because scientific experiments don't show that flight or wings have no benefit, and I've said repeatedly that there's scientific experiments that show that consciousness has no benefit, and that's why your analogy is crap. And your response is to say that it's special pleading on my part when I literally just showed you why it isn't?

You're stupid but you're nowhere near stupid enough to misrepresent your opponent as frequently as you do... I'm just so convinced at this point that you're the least person on this forum worth having a debate with. Even Little Rik is better than you because although he spouts utter bollocks at least he doesn't have the intelligence to use in a deliberately specious way the way you do. You're the atheistic version of William Lane Craig. He's considered a good debater too. But you're both cretins.

Can't you just address my points correctly for once? Many people don't understand what I say but they at least try to, and they at least address what I say properly. You're so dishonest you've practically admitted it in the past, or at least you admitted that you weren't taking a whole debate we had seriously. Do you take anything seriously or are you just a sophisticated troll who is so misleading that many people don't spot what you're doing? To have a discussion, you have to actually interact with the other person's points. Strawmanning them constantly every single time and saying irrelevant shit every single time and telling people they agree with you when they don't.... it's all just dishonest tactics with you. You're a sophist.