Consciousness Trilemma

[The Grand Nudger]

Is there anything you'd like me to clarify on the position which you are criticizing, so that your criticism might be applicable?

[Neo-Scholastic]

I'll explain, for you and for Strawson(lol)...one more time.  To say that some aspect of qualia is illusory, is to say little more than that some aspect of a stage illusion....is a stage illusion.  That it is a misapprehension.

So when people get paper cuts, they don't really hurt, people just think they do? Or maybe it does hurt, but there isn't anyone actually feeling it?

[The Grand Nudger]

The same misapprehension reworded.  Help me help you. Are you familiar with phantom limbs or pain?

[Whateverist]

Well if my point didn't entirely escape you I'd never know it by your response.  That's why I thought it best to get my pompous ass game on, level 3.

I'll just plead ignorance on this one. Whatever it was, it was apparently just to clever for subtle for me at the moment. Work is  so stressful right now I put my xanax in a Pez dispenser.

Might be time for you to ask your doctor if you may be suffering from cognitive dissonance.  I wonder if the Betty Ford center could help?

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I'll explain, for you and for Strawson(lol)...one more time.  To say that some aspect of qualia is illusory, is to say little more than that some aspect of a stage illusion....is a stage illusion.  That it is a misapprehension.

So when people get paper cuts, they don't really hurt, people just think they do? Or maybe it does hurt, but there isn't anyone actually feeling it?

Pain is certainly going on.  That we can ask whose it is gives some insight into how hypnotism can sometimes allow people to disassociate from pain.

[Amarok]

I'll just plead ignorance on this one. Whatever it was, it was apparently just to clever for subtle for me at the moment. Work is  so stressful right now I put my xanax in a Pez dispenser.

Might be time for you to ask your doctor if you may be suffering from cognitive dissonance.  I wonder if the Betty Ford center could help?

---

So when people get paper cuts, they don't really hurt, people just think they do? Or maybe it does hurt, but there isn't anyone actually feeling it?

Pain is certainly going on.  That we can ask whose it is gives some insight into how hypnotism can sometimes allow people to disassociate from pain.

Or scarier you can hypnotize people to re-experience pain . You don't need to be physically injured to experience pain

[Edwardo Piet]

Except that he doesn't.  He keeps conflating the term illusory with non-existent, and the non-existence of one object:the folkloric qualia, with the non-existence of another:whatever qualia actually is.  

No he doesn't. Daniel Dennett doesn't understand that consciousness itself as normally defined cannot be an illusion regardless of all the common misunderstandings connected to it. The only way it could possibly be an illusion would be if it was an illusion of an illusion which makes it not an illusion. If something is an illusion of an illusion then that means it SEEMS that it is an illusion but it ISN'T one. If something seems to seem to be the case to someone then the fact it seems to seem to be the case logically presupposes the fact that something seems to be something to someone. You can't have seeming to seem without seeming.

He demonstrates, by plainly saying..that he has no clue why anyone would advance these positions..he reckons it's because they;re incompatible with physics........parse that, he think nuerologists are chiefly concerned with physics.  He goes on to say that he doesn't care what story "they" tell about the brain.

Because it's not fucking relevant to the tautology that if something seems to be the case to someone then they are conscious of it at least seeming to be the case to them.

I'll explain, for you and for Strawson(lol)...one more time.

I give up on explaining it to you, you thick condescending fuckwit, and Dennett the disingenuous prick.

To say that some aspect of qualia is illusory, is to say little more than that some aspect of a stage illusion....is a stage illusion.

Blah blah blah. I am very familiar with Dennett. And I am very familiar with how he gets more and more unimpressive the more and more you dig deeper into what he's actually saying and all the implications that come with it. He's saying consciousness is a bunch of tricks... he's describing that the way we think we experience consciousness is not how we experience it. So far fair enough. Qualia may not be what we think it is. But qualia still exists and is also not an illusion because that's logically impossible.

(as regards free will, dennets on the record stating his opposition to epiphenomenalism, since he's not an epiphenomenalist, he thinks that mental events can be causal.  This is his version of free will)

You thick motherfucking cunt. Epiphenomenalism is not remotely relevant to the subject of free will. It's relevant to consciousness.

No, he's a compatabilist. He believes free will is compatible with determinism. And he claims that people who think it's a good idea to hold people responsible even though they're not really responsible are compatabilist in everything but name... but he fails to fucking realize (or he knows very well and he's just being disingenuous again) that that's as retarded as a pantheist telling an atheist that they're a pantheist in everything but name simply because they don't choose to label the universe as "God." He's demonstrating the very weakness of the compatabilist position: It's label, nothing more, nothing less. It's taking a look at the fact there's a difference between coerced and uncoerced will and labelling that as "free will" when it has nothing to do with the entire question of free will versus determinism and 1) Everyone already fucking knows that and 2) It's trivially true, beyond doubt, patently obvious and ignoring the very question at hand. Compatabilism steps in after thousands of years of hard incompatabilists beating the libertarian incompatabilists over the head and decides to change the subject and play theologian-like games. And Dennett does the same fucking thing with consciousness when he decides to completely ignore what everyone means by consciousness and corrects their misunderstands but also equivocates like a disingenuous twerp converting the moderately intelligent with his big words but failing to fool those who truly understand matters. He equivocates pretending like he can then say that the fact that we seem to be experiencing what we seem to be experiencing is itself an illusion.

He says that the fact that something seems to be being experienced doesn't mean that it's really being experienced. That's utter nonsense. Even if I am dreaming it's still a fact to myself that I seem to be awake to myself. The seeming itself is not an "illusion" that makes zero fucking sense. An illusion of an illusion=not really an illusion.

As explained in the video... it's possible for any particular experience to be an illusion in the sense we could be dreaming or whatever... but the experience we seem to be having cannot itself be an illusion.

On the matter of his book "Consciousness Explained":

Critics of Dennett's approach, such as David Chalmers and Thomas Nagel, argue that Dennett's argument misses the point of the inquiry by merely redefining consciousness as an external property and ignoring the subjective aspect completely. This has led detractors to nickname the book Consciousness Ignored and Consciousness Explained Away. Dennett and his eliminative materialist supporters, however, respond that the aforementioned "subjective aspect" of conscious minds is nonexistent, an unscientific remnant of commonsense "folk psychology," and that his alleged redefinition is the only coherent description of consciousness.

Dennett can call it "folk psychology" as much as he likes... the subjective aspect is the most known substance in the universe. The fact we don't experience it the way we think we do doesn't change the fact that we do experience it.

His redefinition of consciousness is exactly the same as what he does with Free Will. This is his "approach"... this is what he does. He completely ignores questions by redefining things so he can make a career out of it because plenty of people believe him because they're not smart enough to notice his obfuscations.

Holy fucking crap the fact you suggest I might be too thick to understand shoes how fucking mediocre your intellect is.  I wasn't going to insult you but if you're gonna suggest bullshit like that and be so clearly resistant to logical correction (and be too fucking dumb to recognize tautologies when they're right in front of you (aren't you the same dumb bastard that thought that in an alternative universe 2+2 can perhaps =5 even though that goes against all modal logic that is true in all possible universes (that's what modal logic is you dumb fuck)? Oh yeah you are.)... you're not even worth educating. I am disappointed.

[The Grand Nudger]

Epiphenomenalism is the view that mental events are caused by physical events in the brain, but have no effects upon any physical events. Behavior is caused by muscles that contract upon receiving neural impulses, and neural impulses are generated by input from other neurons or from sense organs. On the epiphenomenalist view, mental events play no causal role in this process. 

https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/epiphenomenalism/



OFC he's a compatibalist...due to his stated opposition to epiphenomenalism.  In his view, mental events -can- play a causal role, that causal role is what -he- refers to as free will.  It's a free will compatible with determinism..hence, a compatabilist.  

That you find Dennets description of qualia unimpressive has absolutely no relevance.  So what?   There's no requirement that a description of qualia be impressive to you.  If you understand that Dennet's position is that qualia is not what it seems to be, then why levy some other unrelated criticism about it? Do you find dennets position...that qualia do not exist as they are described to be....even remotely objectionable?

[Edwardo Piet]

My criticism is of his retarded "approach" of merely redefining shit.

No his reasons for being a compatabilist are utilitarian. He has literally done a whole talk admitting that to him free will is a social construct like money.

All he does is notices he can't make sense of something and then instead of addressing it he makes sense of something else entirely and then relabels that with the same word as the first thing he was supposed to be addressing... and he makes a career out of it by writing books with verbose obfuscations and many misdirections and digressions... because many people are intellectually inferior enough to fall for it.

My criticism is the same as the critics I quoted from Wikipedia in my previous post in this thread. But you're not going to understand this stuff--like you didn't understand the matter of modal logic being entirely relevant to logic in alternative universes--as basic as it is, I'm afraid, and my disappointment has worn off now and I just can't be bothered explaining things to you anymore. It's a pity that you're so thick that you think I might be thick and you're not even capable of understanding that outright tautologies are not only true in all possible universes but you also fucking think that science can trump them when we're talking about the non-illusory reality of our own subjectivity.

Bah, you're a waste of my time, I'm logging out of AF for the day so I don't waste my compulsive need to correct bad logic on someone as beyond correction as yourself.

[The Grand Nudger]

I think that both he and eliminitive materialists would suggest that the original definition was crap, and remind us that an appeal to tradition is just that...an appeal to tradition.

[Edwardo Piet]

"crap" or not... the fact we are experiencing something is the most certainly known fact in the universe to anyone.

The whole of science depends on our observations that presuppose that.

For fuck's sake.

Whether he chooses to label that "consciousness" or not is as irrelevant as the fact that he likes to label ordinary human willpower we already know we have as "free will". He needs to stop pissing about with labels... but he's not going to do that because he's made a career out of his obfuscating.

With or without that "crap" defintiion... what that "crap" definition refers to does exist, must exist and is not an illusion.

He has literally said that the illusions of after images, for example, are still experienced but they do not exist. That makes zero fucking sense. Illusons obviously exist as illusions. It's him that conflates nonexistence and illustriousness not Strawson. This is the mistake the elimativists make... they decide that the existence of something in particular isn't of the same nature as most things so they say it doesn't exist altogether. That's basically the No True Scotsman fallacy.