RE: Good read on consciousness
January 7, 2021 at 10:55 pm
(This post was last modified: January 7, 2021 at 11:07 pm by The Grand Nudger.)
In the illusionist perspective, consciousness isn't an emergent phenomena, phenomenal experience is a misrepresentation of symbolic language.
It's subtle, but important. Yes, the illusionist position agrees that all of this machinery is emergent in the sense that it arose by naturally self organizing means - but qualia are not meaningfully real in the illusionists pov. That's part of the machine, not an object being observed...not something that any "we" apprehends. Not that there is a you experiencing what it's like to be - that this is a report of states meaningful to the operation of our brain but not necessarily tied to the content of the report.
One of the problems right now, the meta-illusion problem, is that it's looking for all the world like either the illusionists or the dualists have it right. Unless we find the little man that amounts to us somewhere in there, consciousness is not at all like it reports itself to be..or it's made of stuff that we simply cannot detect. We intuitively recoil at illusionism...but the dualists never seem to get anything right. Rock and a hard place.
It's subtle, but important. Yes, the illusionist position agrees that all of this machinery is emergent in the sense that it arose by naturally self organizing means - but qualia are not meaningfully real in the illusionists pov. That's part of the machine, not an object being observed...not something that any "we" apprehends. Not that there is a you experiencing what it's like to be - that this is a report of states meaningful to the operation of our brain but not necessarily tied to the content of the report.
One of the problems right now, the meta-illusion problem, is that it's looking for all the world like either the illusionists or the dualists have it right. Unless we find the little man that amounts to us somewhere in there, consciousness is not at all like it reports itself to be..or it's made of stuff that we simply cannot detect. We intuitively recoil at illusionism...but the dualists never seem to get anything right. Rock and a hard place.
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