The Scripture Is False And The Biblical God Is Dead.

[emjay]

Okay, well I'll get to that in your reading matter I just associate him with the hard problem is all I really meant by that (and he coined the phrase is that right?).

Sorry, forgot to respond to this before. Yes, he's the one who did so, though obviously this is a problem that was considered by people long before him.

I don't know, I don't mind the guy. Even if I didn't agree with him (which I do because the hard problem makes sense to be considered as such), there's a lot of insightful things he has to say that are worth hearing/reading, and it's always good to be exposed to that stuff.

I don't agree with illusionist philosophers like Keith Frankish, but I also don't mind the guy himself. He can explain things quite well, and I've gotten to learn a lot from him listening to Mind Chat, especially.

As for panpsychism, I understand it can come off as "woo-ey" to some people, but it is at least something to be considered/critiqued seriously imo. It's not a theory perse, of course, but it sets a potential starting point for how one could resolve the hard problem eventually.

I have read Chalmers in the past, and I'm sure at some point he did resonate with me... in a time when I used to buy every book on consciousness I could find, desperate for answers about the hard question. But at some point I had let's say a paradigm shift in thinking... so, different from growing out of touch as is the case for me with the rest of it. That paradigm shift being to consider the hard question a waste of time and unproductive to think about because the best it can be is speculation, and not only that but also a hindrance to learning about the mind and brain. Ie there are some people who throw the baby out with the bathwater in that regard, ie they in effect say 'what's the point thinking about the easy questions [which we can summarise as being psychology and neuroscience, or even content-based/functional etc theories on consciousness] of consciousness, because they can never touch on the hard question?' That approach misses out on the richness of the stuff we can learn and the brain and its processes, and taken to extremes would mean we'd never have learnt anything about the brain, never having got out of the starting gate as it were. And to varying degrees between - again using that word - tantamount and actual, my view on that nowadays tends to be that a full account of the easy questions, would amount to a full explanation of consciousness, to me.

I haven't got to illusionism yet, so thanks for the extra name to look into, and yeah, I'll definitely check out Mind Chat at some point.

Panpsychism just feels completely at odds with the, let's say process-driven or functional, way I think about consciousness, ie not some quantifiable unit present to different degrees in everything, but something that arises in some way from specific neural activity or processes. Panpsychism also feels like pre paradigm shift thinking for me; harking back to a time when I was happy with purely speculative theories. Granted I don't as yet know the ins and outs of Panpsychism (I'll get to that in your reading list ) but on the face of it I can't see how it can be anything but speculative, and therefore likely unsatisfying to me.