RE: Good read on consciousness
January 9, 2021 at 4:33 am
(This post was last modified: January 9, 2021 at 4:46 am by GrandizerII.)
(January 9, 2021 at 12:36 am)The Grand Nudger Wrote: Are we clearly experiencing anything? The problems with any statement that rests on that assertion just jump right out, I'm sure.
Not a thing - in the sense relevant to the disagreement between realism and illusionism. Both positions agree that there is a matter which they are attempting to explain. Illusions are real and can, themselves, have great power. It is not that sense of not being a thing that separates the two positions.
Realists think that there's actually some-thing- in there doing what it says it's doing, that it's reports are a meaningfully accurate description of it..as a thing. Wetness™ is real and is somehow apprehended and then experienced by a somehow conscious observer...rather than being a report of symbolic language by an information processing machine which is distributed, not a unitary observer, and of which no part is conscious..for example.
Everyone wants the illusionists mechanics - nobody wants to use the word.
-to be thorough, emergentism (in tom) is the notion that some-thing- as above, that is meaningfully like it's own reports, arose out of these illusionists interactions of non conscious elements, in which we see nothing of those reports occurring.
We say wetness alot, but we can't find we or wetness in there, or any eye to see either if they were, and it turns out that we don't need either to explain that we keep saying wetness alot (even if that's not the right answer, ultimately). If we're going to talk about a hard problem - I'd say that's the one...not the hard problem of "I can't find the thing I strongly believe exists". In many instances, there is a very simple reason for that state of affairs.
This is somewhat identical to the view expressed, and more clearly explained, here:
https://aeon.co/essays/what-if-your-cons...your-brain
However, this view makes no sense to me. The author acknowledges that we experience stuff, and yet they're not really real, just [mis]representations of what goes on in our brains. Pseudo-phenomenal as opposed to truly phenomenal, despite there being no meaningful difference.
Basically, it's an attempt to describe how the brain works in a way that is trivially true, while using the confusing term "illusion", and yet failing to consider the hard problem all along (how exactly do phenomenological experiences "we" have come about). Instead, it handwaves it away and states that those experiences "we" have, they're not ... really there ... even though we have them, lol.
And the matter of the self isn't that relevant. It doesn't matter what "we" is or whether consciousness is unified or disparate or whatever, the problem is still there.
Snippet from the link above:
Quote:Second, isn’t the very idea of illusionism confused? To be under the illusion of seeing an apple is to have an experience exactly like that of seeing an apple, even though there’s no apple present. How then could we be under the illusion of having an experience? If you are having an experience exactly like a pain experience, then you are having a pain experience. As the philosopher John Searle puts it in The Mystery of Consciousness (1997), when it comes to consciousness, the appearance is the reality. This looks like a serious objection, but in fact it is easily dealt with. Properties of experiences themselves cannot be illusory in the sense described, but they can be illusory in a very similar one. When illusionists say that phenomenal properties are illusory, they mean that we have introspective representations like those that we would have if our experiences had phenomenal properties. And we can have such representations even if our experiences don’t have phenomenal properties. Of course, this assumes that the representations themselves don’t have phenomenal properties. But, as I noted, representations needn’t possess the properties they represent. Representations of redness needn’t be red, and representations of phenomenal properties needn’t be phenomenal.
Addressing the last statement in this paragraph, representations (in this context) of phenomenal properties do have to be phenomenal. The redness analogy is a bad analogy because representations of red aren't demanded by definition to be really red. Actually, maybe they are "red" by necessity, but regardless, it doesn't support the author's pov imo.
