(January 10, 2021 at 12:49 am)The Grand Nudger Wrote: Illusionism may be wrong...but it's not incoherent. In attention schema theory, it's hypothesized that the thing we call consciousness might come about in a machine or organism in the same manner and for the same reasons that a body control schema would.
Hypothesized, but how would you even demonstrate that, given the difficulty of doing so with other human beings?
Quote:It's value, in the case of organisms it's selective advantage, is not in the accuracy of the report-as-fact, but in the ability of the report to produce beneficial outcomes. IE, not die and the like. It doesn't have to be a true report of an actual state of a discreet organ or region, in order to be truly useful.
Again, the problem isn't with value or practicality, it's with whether or not illusionism makes sense. My understanding so far is that illusionism states that the qualia we experience isn't real, it's a trick of the brain. If this is a proper description, then this is stupid, because the fact that we experience it is what makes it real. It may not be real in the sense that physical objects are real (whereby we're able to see those from a second/third-person-perspective), but it is real in the sense that we can each directly experience our respective consciousness from first-person-perspective, and it is real in a way that is different from how physical objects are real.
Quote:The absence of any little man, or any insistence that consciousness must be so and so, is a strnegth of the view, not a weakness...provided we're trying to explain something by what observations and data we have, first. It can't be said enough. We can't find the little man. We can't find the Other Stuff. We can't even find a unified controlling structure. Theres no cpu. The most fundamental things about this report are simply false - even if something meaningful about the report, which would make illusionism false, were true.
There's no "little man" to see. You experience the qualia, you don't see it. Unless you're a p-zombie, of course.
