When I was younger I used to really like authors such as Steven Pinker, Lawrence Krauss, Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, Michael Shermer, Daniel Dennett, Sean Carroll and Jonathan Haidt, but now for some reason I find them repulsive, but I can't put my finger on why. Even if I find myself agreeing with them, I just find them unbearable and their whole shtick deeply complacent and dishonest, but I'm unable to articulate why. Has anyone else had this experience?
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It just seems to me like there's very little point to btfo-ing religiongays with fact and logic. There's nothing useful you can gain from it if you're already not religious, it doesn't develop you as a person, it doesn't give you any new insights.
Dennett is right about consciousness though.
Main problem is that you have as much glaring problems with their beliefs and outlook as religiongays and some of them are the forefront of social engineering to that end.
Oh look it's the Dennett consciousness guy again.
Not that anon, but what is wrong about his view of consciousness? What in fact IS consciousness and where is his model or theory inadequate?
I was under the impression that he's an emergentist: and is the result of a series of smaller specialized sub-processes that kind of all compete in escalating conjunctions, and what ever wins out across all those levels determines what is 'front of mind'.
Have I got him wrong? And if not, what is wrong about that as a theory for consciousness?
Dennett isn't an emergentist, because emergentism implies there is something the brain produces that is called consciousness. No materialist believes this, because it's impossible to say how what is emerging could be material. Instead, Dennett believes that consciousness is and ONLY is the activity in the brain that is correlated with conscious activity. The conscious activity itself doesn't exist, the only thing that is "real" is the brain activity observed by scans etc. So the medium of consciousness through which everything must be perceived, including brain scans, doesn't exist, but somehow this non-existent medium is able to exist enough to be used to assess brain scans accurately enough to discern that the medium you are using to do the discerning with does not actually exist.
>Instead, Dennett believes that consciousness is and ONLY is the activity in the brain that is correlated with conscious activity.
Oh so it's just like when he says that the "self" is a abstract concept like a "center of gravity". You can't physically hold or separate a center of gravity, it exists, but it exists as a specific point in the whole of the object.
Or to use an analogy of my own, it's like how "running" is the activity correlated with the contraction and expansion of parts of the human body such that it propels forward, the "running" itself doesn't exist, but the legs, tendons, muscles, neuronal impulses (just like consciousness) do?
>the "running" itself doesn't exist, but the legs, tendons, muscles, neuronal impulses (just like consciousness)
I think you're making a mistake here. Just because something is reducible to something else, it doesn't mean that the descriptions of things it is reducible to refer to things that are somehow "more real" than the higher order thing they constitute.
Then I carelessly phrased it wrong: Running is real, but it's not a physical substance, neither is consciousness, but the tissues which are the substrate of both are physical substances and real (and Running and Consciousness are both real, or rather become real if and when tissues are necessarily effected).
Categories is hard...
That would be the emergentist view, kind of.
One problem with this view is that all matter can be viewed as no more than a type of behaviour. There is nothing still and solid existing at the foundation of everything.
So that's not the view that Dennett takes?
I just see him get a lot of flak, and I can't understand why, maybe the problem is that he's taking a position against something so nebulously defined that it's not worth taking a position against it - since there's nothing to specify?
I have to admit I'm really confused.
Sorry I meant that would be the eliminativist view
Ah okay. that helps a little bit, thank you for walking me through that anon.
Would you reject a materialist account of e.g. language on the same basis? Seems like you could make exactly this argument about any abstract concept by strawmanning the abstract concept as literally made of matter instead of just a useful abstraction we use to understand matter as it behaves.
Consciousness the furthest thing from an abstraction possible. Everything we can possibly experience exists as something within our consciousness. We can never escape it or know of anything outside of it, at best we might be able to know about things by them being represented within it. An abstraction would ne the idea that one can someone see one's own consciousness within a world of things-in-themselves and assess it as if you weren't using said consciousness to perceive it.
>Everything we can possibly experience exists as something within our consciousness.
What? There is plenty of shit that you haven't experienced and is not in in your consciousness now. What you mean is that the way we experience the world is through conscious perception. But even this isn't true since there is loads of unconscious processing going on to allow us to experience the world. Consciousness is just the surface of a much deeper biological reality.
What medium are you using to suppose that there are things you don't experience?
My brain. You use your brain too.
How do you know about your brain?
With my brain
Nope. The only reason you think you have a brain is because of conscious experiences that have led you to the conclusion that you have one. There is no special way other way of "knowing" something that circumvents your consciousness.
Dennett is an eliminative materialist, not an emergentist.
What's the difference?
An eliminative materialist believes that the only way to explain consciousness is to say it doesn't exist. An emergentist says that some systems somehow produce consciousness.
Sounds like they're exactly the same and any purported difference is just a language game.
>that the only way to explain consciousness is to say it doesn't exist.
So when Dennett says consciousness doesn't "exist" what does he mean? What is he denying the existence of?
Qualia basically, as far as I understand it. A precise definition of qualia, however, has not yet been produced by the supporters of the existence of qualia.
Dennett just begs the question be pretending that "qualia" means "something that exists within x substrate", and then denying that such a substrate could exist. But qualia doesn't mean this, it just means the experience of a sensation, such as a colour, so his argument is irrelevant.
>But qualia doesn't mean this, it just means the experience of a sensation, such as a colour,
You can rephrase it like that, but now we are still waiting for a precise definition of "experience", which goes beyond the neuroscientific explanation of "experience", since qualia-proponents claim the purely neuroscientific explanation, which I assume Dennett ascribes to, is incomplete.
It's not rephrasing, that is just exactly what it means and it does not require anything to be added to it.
>It's not rephrasing, that is just exactly what it means and it does not require anything to be added to it.
That's what "rephrasing" means.
No, that would be using it as it is defined.
So Dennett says that Qualia, which is a thing that can't be defined doesn't exist?
Why is everybody so mad if we can't define it?
>Why is everybody so mad if we can't define it?
They are mad because they just feel like it should exist. When you concentrate on your own experience, there are certain things (for example "the redness of red") which they claim can never, not even in principle, be explained by materialist science. Why some people get so strongly attached to the idea that materialism can't explain this is quite a mystery.
> they just feel like [feeling] should exist
Cool argument.
They feel1 like feel2-ing should exist.
feel1: a non-magical version of feeling
feel2: a magical version of feeling
How are you making this distinction? Can you explain how exactly such a distinction exists? I feel... Therefore I feel... Therefore feeling exists.
My point is precisely that proponents of qualia seem to be arguing for making this distinction, without being able to explain exactly what it is they think we are ignoring by positing that every feeling is of the feel1 kind.
They aren't making such a distinction so your argument is a straw man. Qualia just means a quality that is perceived.
Because materialism cannot account for experience of a thing. Nagel's Bat rightfully points out this issue, as one example. Even talking about experience is an issue since it's private.
Unless materialism has somehow discovered consciousness transference that I've not heard about.
Nagel's bat is incomprehensible nonsense, see for example "‘What it is Like’ Talk is not Technical Talk" by Jonathan Farrell.
>You haven't even started with the most basic step of defining what "illusion" is.
You said "X is clearly an explicit and definite thing", I said "it's not, it merely appears that way". That is the sense in which I think there is something about redness which is illusory.
>The same from the outside perspective.
So you posit there is something that makes them different, yet is excluded from the phrase "physically identical". Sounds to me like you're making a circular argument, then. Leibniz is a fricking moron btw (look up Leibniz' mill).
>Even though these answers are obviously wrong and no one actually believes them.
Wow great argument.
>If we posit two identical systems, there is only one system. There are no two identical systems, there are only two systems which appear identical. Are you capable of understanding the difference? Science works on the basis of probability, not causality, due to the problem of induction. We cannot deductively prove the answer to this question. We cannot even inductively prove the answer, at best you can make a guess. But a guess is defeated by the person simply being unshackled and remarking, "I actually saw X color", which gives us a 100% success rate as opposed to the 50% rate of induction.
This is just a bunch of wank and you know it. Let's say they are physically identical except for their location in space, which differs by about 1 meter.
The indefinability of qualia is exactly why it refutes materialism. If it were definable it would be self-refuting as a counter to materialism. The point is it A) is undefinable, but B) nevertheless exists despite that fact.
I'm afraid don't buy that argument. If something is undefinable, then there wouldn't be a word to describe it, because other wise how would you know you're talking about it. This is all very basic Wittgenstein stuff.
>If something is undefinable, then there wouldn't be a word to describe it
That's wrong though.
>because other wise how would you know you're talking about it.
By physically pointing to similar phenomena as we actually do in real life. We never actually know we're speaking about the same qualia though, we just assume it. This is very basic philosophy, which it looks like not even Wittgenstein wrapped his head around.
>That's wrong though.
Why?
>By physically pointing to similar phenomena as we actually do in real life
Then why are there literally thousands of abstract concepts we can differentiate and distinguish all the time, concepts like 'harmony' or 'melody' are the more experiential, but how come we can define complicated abstract concepts like 'rationality' or 'reproducibility' or even the many senses of the word 'fidelity'. How come we can define these
> We never actually know we're speaking about the same qualia though, we just assume it.
What are we assuming though?
You're saying qualia is something, but you can't say what it is. Well to me, in practical terms that sounds like a useless word. But evidently people are passionate about it, so what do they associate this word with? What do you personally mean? You can distinguish it form other things, for example, why do we need the word "qualia" where the words "sensation" "consciousness" "experience" or even "qualities" dont' suffice and why?
Otherwise what you're arguing is that this word which means nothing because we can't determine what it means invalidates materialism, even though we can't determine what properties it has that negate the propositions behind materialism.
>You're saying qualia is something, but you can't say what it is.
I said what it is, see
>why can’t we use the word sensation
You can call them sensations if you want. Qualia extends to things like the experience of dreams and mental imagery though, which are arguably not sensations.
Similarly “experience” can be used in phrases like “the experience of being black in America”, which is not a (single) qualia.
So I think qualia is a pretty good word for eliminating ambiguity.
Sounds like a definition to me... but anyway...
How do we know that a sufficiently complicated computer couldn't experience the qualia of a doorbell? More importantly, what does it refer to: the distinct qualities that make it recognizable as that particular sound? Or is it more general experience of all of the above (which to me sounds more like 'consciousness')?
Because if it is the former, then we can reasonably assume that even simple systems and creatures have a rudimentary qualia, I'm not making a dumb DMT-bro assumption that rocks or water have qualia, I'm specifically referring to things with what we might call 'information processing' abilities, and what I'm saying is that who are you do deny that a facial-recognition algorithm isn't a computer experiencing a very rudimentary 'qualia' of a face?
>So I think qualia is a pretty good word for eliminating ambiguity.
Not really, why else do I need to keep badgering you to understand it?
>Sounds like a definition to me
I wasn’t the guy who was saying it was undefinable. If you think I gave a definition then that’s fine.
>Or is it more general experience of all of the above (which to me sounds more like 'consciousness')?
It’s that one. It’s the fact that you had any first-person experience at all.
Chalmers calls it “the hard problem of consciousness”. Frequently that terms gets used in place of “qualia”, as long as it’s understood that we mean first-person experiential consciousness, rather than the merely behaviorist concept of an organism responding to stimuli. You can call it consciousness if you want.
>How do we know that a sufficiently complicated computer couldn't experience the qualia of a doorbell?
>who are you do deny that a facial-recognition algorithm isn't a computer experiencing a very rudimentary 'qualia' of a face?
These are open philosophical questions and they are matters of active debate. But you don’t need to be able to answer these questions in order to know what qualia is and understand the concept. Just like a physicist doesn’t need to know the ultimate nature of matter in order to know that matter is real.
>Why?
Because there are obvious counterexamples in existence, like the color red. Every definition for it begs the question. There are no real definitions which are self-sufficient without reference to something which is undefinable, the actual experience of the qualia red.
>Then why are there literally thousands of abstract concepts we can differentiate and distinguish all the time,
Because we have all been familiarized with them since childhood with repeated exposure, we are repeatedly exposed to music which sounds beautiful, and then told that this word "harmonious" means what that sensation conveys. The definition is in the sensation which cannot be given in words. There are also some words which are completely abstract, like numbers and so forth, which possibly do not require qualia at all to be meaningful. These are the types of words materialism relies on in order to reduce the world to them, which is why their view of the world is typically atomistic or based on other purely abstract concepts which cannot adequately describe reality (because they abstract from all qualia - they will never be able to define "red" except proximately, eg via wavelengths which still beg the question).
>What are we assuming though?
That other people's qualitative experiences are the exact same as ours, for example that someone else sees red in the same way that I do, as a particular color. Someone's entire subjective perception could be warped such that red appears as green to them. There are colorblind people who are never aware of their deficiency for a long time because of this. But colorblindness is fortunate in that it can actually be detected in theory. Someone with normal color perception (the full range) but with a completely shifted series of subjective perceptions could, subjectively, see the world in an entirely different way without ever knowing. Their qualia are totally different, even though we all use the same definition and point to the same things in physical space.
I have to admit I have no idea what you're talking about,I'm going to give up... I can't understand what Qualia is or might be... and as such I can't understand why it refutes materialism. Thanks for trying anon, but in all honesty: you might be right, but your explanation is inaccessible to me.
>Because there are obvious counterexamples in existence, like the color red. Every definition for it begs the question. There are no real definitions which are self-sufficient without reference to something which is undefinable, the actual experience of the qualia red.
There are several ways out of this. Why hasten to assume a materialistic explanation is impossible when we don't even have the full neurological picture?
For example, you could say that your experience of redness as something undefinable yet definite is an illusion, and it is actually not definite (therefore there is nothing that needs further definition). Redness could be defined only in relation to earlier experiences of redness, and in relation to other qualia (most obviously colour other colours and the other qualia of vision). It explains both why we feel there is a specific quality to redness (namely the specific memory or collection of memories that redness reminds us of), and why it is so ungraspable (because there is no specific quality at the bottom of it).
This example is just a very small step out of the comfort-zone of taking your internal experience fully at face value, yet even this is too big of a step for many philosophers.
>This example is just a very small step out of the comfort-zone of taking your internal experience fully at face value, yet even this is too big of a step for many philosophers.
Curious that all the “qualia is an illusion” people will still ask for local anesthesia at the dentist’s office before he starts drilling into their teeth.
The self is an illusion, experience is an illusion, there’s nothing there, don’t take your experience at face value. But everyone takes pain at face value. There are no skeptics when it comes to pain.
I'm not saying qualia/pain/etc. don't exist, just that they are explainable in materialist terms.
>when we don't even have the full neurological picture?
Because neurology can only show us physical mechanisms, it cannot actually peer into our consciousness and see our experiences the way we see them.
>you could say that your experience of redness as something undefinable yet definite is an illusion
Why would I say something that is obviously incorrect? Red is a definite color which always appears if not in the exact same way then in a way which is similar enough to be easily recognized every time. Besides, if something as clearly real as "redness" is an illusion, then all of your pretense to neurological knowledge most certainly is (because an error based upon more fundamental errors are usually greater in the absurdity of the consequences).
> Redness could be defined only in relation to earlier experiences of redness
Redness is already defined in relation to the experience of redness, which is what my previous posts just explained. That's not a definition though, it's a tautology. It still doesn't solve the problem because a tautology is not a definition. It again just begs the question.
>and why it is so ungraspable
It's not ungraspable though, it's only ungraspable by language. Why are you assuming this?
>This example is just a very small step out of the comfort-zone
I'm interested in the truth, not leaving my comfort zone. It looks like you're just desperate to attack what is obviously true. The only reason you wouldn't do the same with basic mathematical axioms is because most people are smart enough to know you're an idiot if you attempted it, and you don't want to risk your reputation.
>Red is a definite color which always appears if not in the exact same way then in a way which is similar enough to be easily recognized every time.
Your model of red is: "it always appears like X, therefore we recognize it". You can simplify this model by leaving out X. Successive experiences of redness are linked by a process of recognition, which results in the illusion that there is a specific thing we are recognizing, and you call this specific thing "qualia". We can just leave it out without violating even the subjective properties of redness (let alone the behavioural ones).
>Your model of red is: "it always appears like X, therefore we recognize it". You can simplify this model by leaving out X.
You need to explain why we can do that. X is clearly an explicit and definite thing, as confirmed by actual experience because we all have words for it which always match the same things, even though the words can't be adequately defined taken by themselves (because language is incapable of the task, not because redness is an illusion).
>hich results in the illusion that there is a specific thing we are recognizing
You still have not shown how it's an illusion. See above.
>You still have not shown how it's an illusion. See above.
Indeed I haven't, I've just shown that it *could be* an illusion.
>X is clearly an explicit and definite thing, as confirmed by actual experience because we all have words for it which always match the same things, even though the words can't be adequately defined taken by themselves
Just because many people unerringly refer to the same things as red doesn't mean that there is necessarily some magical nonphysical "redness" quale underlying this process.
> I've just shown that it *could be* an illusion.
No, you haven't. You haven't even started with the most basic step of defining what "illusion" is. I would hazard to guess this is because this would end up making all scientific knowledge illusion too if you set it out in explicit terms. Qualia cannot be illusions, the only things that are illusions, in common parlance, are things which are either the product of incorrect abstract thought (ie pure maths or logic) or the belief in an object (not the qualia per se) which is not actually there, ie a hallucination, which can be verified by the self and others, for example dreams (the qualia in the dream being still entirely real in themselves, the dream itself is however not reality).
>Just because many people unerringly refer to the same things as red doesn't mean that there is necessarily some magical nonphysical "redness" quale underlying this process.
Because I see red, red exists. Because red is not a linguistic concept, I therefore cannot define it, and therefore it is not reducible to scientific terms, rather scientific terms are reducible to qualia because qualia are the building blocks of all perception, and science bases its judgements, at the most basic level, on mathematical correlations of perceptions (qualia). It's quite simple.
>You just said they are the same when describing the experiment!
The same from the outside perspective. Just like two trees can appear the same, however they are actually two different trees. Are you aware of Leibniz's principle of indiscernible? There are no two things which can be the same. And you still haven't answered my questions as to "why."
>What the frick do you expect me to answer when you can just turn around and make things the same or not the same arbitrarily depending on how it suits your argument?
Because that's exactly what you've been doing to me the entire time, by attempting to assert that qualia are explainable neurologically, because... we just don't have enough information yet... or, better yet, it's just an illusion... Even though these answers are obviously wrong and no one actually believes them.
>In my view if we posit two identical physical systems and subject them to identical stimuli, they wile react in the same way.
If we posit two identical systems, there is only one system. There are no two identical systems, there are only two systems which appear identical. Are you capable of understanding the difference? Science works on the basis of probability, not causality, due to the problem of induction. We cannot deductively prove the answer to this question. We cannot even inductively prove the answer, at best you can make a guess. But a guess is defeated by the person simply being unshackled and remarking, "I actually saw X color", which gives us a 100% success rate as opposed to the 50% rate of induction.
Furthermore I think you are fleeing into increasingly abstract philosophizing as a way of avoiding the actual argument. If we were discussing, for example, the force of gravity and I said "two identical systems of masses will be subject to gravitational forces of the same magnitude" you wouldn't give me this whole principle of indiscernibles spiel. Why is it necessary in this case? We just become entangled in a radical skepticism which I suspect is just a general skepticism of science, only selectively applied to consciousness because you can't bear the thought of consciousness being subject to scientific inquiry.
That'll be all from me, thanks for the responses, it's been a welcome change from the consciousness threads on IQfy.
Nothing is comparable to consciousness because consciousness is the medium through which we perceive everything. Every single answer you've provided has been based on things you have come to know about via conscious experience. Without that medium you would be either a p-zombie or dead.
Redi ad IQfy et numquam redi.
My parting gift from this thread is a thought experiment for you because these arguments make me weary, the people obsessed with scientific method use their own kind of mystical handwaving by repeatedly putting forth specious and vague arguments based on the belief that neurology will make some mystical breakthrough:
Imagine you had someone who was temporarily entirely incapable of communication of any sort with the outside world, but was still conscious and able to see colors with his eyes (his eyes are shut and he sees it without any exposure to external light). Now imagine you have access to enhanced neural manipulation techniques which normally allow you to artificially induce colors in a person's vision without actually using any wavelength of light to stimulate the retina. Now, this technology is experimental, and people respond with different answers for the same neural stimulus, some will say red, some green, despite having the same type of stimulus applied and the same brain structure. You apply the stimulus to the patient expecting it to generate the color red. How do you confirm the patient has actually seen this color without asking him, purely via neurological science?
>Now, this technology is experimental, and people respond with different answers for the same neural stimulus, some will say red, some green, despite having the same type of stimulus applied and the same brain structure.
If it's really the exact same stimulus to the exact same brain structure, then this is not possible. That aside (maybe the apparatus is just a bit unreliable or something)...
>How do you confirm the patient has actually seen this color without asking him, purely via neurological science?
Just examine his visual system as it responds to this stimulus. I don't understand why you would think there is any problem with this, assuming we have a detailed understanding of the visual system.
>If it's really the exact same stimulus to the exact same brain structure, then this is not possible.
Why not? Step outside of your comfort zone. There are no two things in this world which are actually the same, they merely appear to be the same.
>Just examine his visual system as it responds to this stimulus.
This is a non-answer. We've already determined that two people have differing answers despite the same responses in their visual system.
>Why not? Step outside of your comfort zone. There are no two things in this world which are actually the same, they merely appear to be the same.
You just said they are the same when describing the experiment! What the frick do you expect me to answer when you can just turn around and make things the same or not the same arbitrarily depending on how it suits your argument?
>This is a non-answer. We've already determined that two people have differing answers despite the same responses in their visual system.
In my view if we posit two identical physical systems and subject them to identical stimuli, they wile react in the same way. If you deny this I don't see how empirical science could work at all.
>A precise definition of qualia, however, has not yet been produced by the supporters of the existence of qualia.
The way that colors look is qualia. The way that a doorbell sounds is qualia. The way that pain feels is qualia. I mean the mere fact of the experiences themselves, the fact that they are experiences at all. Any conscious first-person sensation you have is qualia.
The “problem of other minds” is precisely just the problem of how we can know that other humans, besides ourselves, actually have qualia or not. What if everyone around you was a soulless automaton with no experiences? Just external behavior? Then they would lack qualia.
If you stub your toe, then I can observe your behavior, I can see you rubbing your toe, I can hear your verbal report that it hurts, and from this I can infer that you are in pain, but I can’t actually feel your pain directly. It’s not me who’s hurt. Why? Because you have access to your qualia, and I don’t.
This is not a specialized technical concept that was only dreamed up by philosophers. Non-philosophers are familiar with it and can speak about it, even if they don’t have a name for it. When I was back in high school, one of my friends said to me at lunch, “I wish during the school day I could become completely unconscious like I was asleep, but my body would keep going through the day and it would keep talking and doing work and no one else would notice any difference. And then after the school day was over I would become conscious again, so that way I could go to school without actually experiencing it.” All he was saying was, I wish I could turn off my qualia while my body kept working as normal. He had exactly rediscovered Chalmers’ concept of the p-zombie.
Asking for a “precise definition” of qualia is like asking for a precise definition of matter. You just point to it and go, “matter is the stuff that’s out there”. Similarly, you just point to your own first-person experience and say, that’s qualia.
Is there anything else you want me to elaborate on?
Thanks for making an honest effort. My question is: it seems like proponents of qualia are not satisfied with the current (and hypothetical future) neurological explanations of colour vision, hearing, pain etc. As far as I've seen, the argument goes that even when you have a complete neurological model of these phenomena, you *still* haven't accounted for qualia. So then it seems to me that, by giving these examples, you are counting on the general acceptance of e.g. the existence of colour vision, and using it as an argument for why qualia exist, without really addressing the most important feature of qualia, namely that they are (even in principle) unexplainable using the methods of empirical science.
>namely that they are (even in principle) unexplainable using the methods of empirical science.
That is correct. The epistemological question is arguably more troubling (or at least more persistent) than the ontological question. You cannot directly observe any first-person experience that is not your own, so it’s not clear how there could ever be an empirically verified theory of qualia. You may be able to make reasonable assumptions, but there will always be a fundamental open question in a way unlike any other phenomenon.
This would require a thorough analysis of the function of the subject within empirical science which is beyond the scope of this IQfy post. I agree that empirical research on the subject itself brings unique problems, but I don't think these problems are intractable on top of being unique.
>So when Dennett says consciousness doesn't "exist" what does he mean? What is he denying the existence of?
When I say unicorns and fairies don't exist what am I denying the existence of? We have plenty of words that refer to imaginary concepts.
I don't understand how that answers my question and have to admit my embarrassment that I don't understand the analogy, a Unicorn is a horselike creature with a narwhal-like horn protruding from it's skull. A fairy is a humanoid with wings and maybe other paranormal powers. These are clearly defined even if they are imaginary... but what is consciousness, what is he denying the existence of specifically?
Google definition consciousness:
the fact of awareness by the mind of itself and the world.
If you have a better one please post it. I may have messed up with the unicorn, I thought you were going to make a dumb argument about how using a word to refer to something must mean it exists.
> I thought you were going to make a dumb argument about how using a word to refer to something must mean it exists.
Understandable. Lots of trolls here. But I'm not playing a "gotcha" game. I genuinely am just flummoxed by the discussions and controversy over consciousness.
So does Dennett actually deny the "awareness of the mind itself and the world"? Is that a fair and accurate statement?
At it's heart it's a fear that there might not be something ethereal or supernatural about the mind isn't it?
triggered lol
>Dennett is right about consciousness though.
>blind man convinces others that sight doesn't exist
Don't feed the hylic. It can't go five seconds without telling everyone that they're p-zombies just like it is and every time it gets absolutely piled on and ends up resorting to smug mockery. It's exactly everything that is wrong with the hylics in the OP.
>"Why can't everyone just be rational like me, look how straight and simple everything can be if you just insist circles don't exist and are actually squares!!'
Read Nietzsche and you'll find out why. He already sniffed out their type in the 19th century.
What does he say about them?
The truth is precisely the opposite of what is claimed here: scientific knowledge nowadays has simply no faith in itself, to say nothing of an overarching ideal. And where it consists of passion, love, ardour, suffering, that doesn't make it the opposite of the ascetic ideal but much rather its newest and most pre-eminent form. Does that sound strange to you? . . . There are indeed a sufficient number of good and modest working people among scholars nowadays, people happy in their little corners. For this reason: because their work satisfies them, from time to time, with some presumption, they make noises demanding that people today should in general be happy, particularly with scientific knowledge. There are so many useful things to do. I don't deny that. The last thing I want to do is to ruin the pleasure these honest labourers take in their handiwork. For I'm happy about their work. But the fact that people are working rigorously in science these days and that there are satisfied workers is simply no proof that science today, as a totality, has a goal, a will, an ideal, a passion in a great faith. As I've said, the opposite is the case.
Where science is not the most recently appearing form of the ascetic ideal—and then it's a matter of cases too rare, noble, and exceptional to counter the general judgment—science today is a hiding place for all kinds of unhappiness, disbelief, gnawing worms, despectio sui [self-contempt], bad conscience. It is the anxiety of the absence of ideals, suffering from the lack of a great love, the dissatisfaction with a condition of involuntary modest content. Oh, what nowadays does science not conceal! How much, at least, is it designed to conceal! The efficiency of our best scholars, their mindless diligence, their heads smoking day and night, the very mastery of their handiwork—how often has all this derived its meaning from the fact that they don't permit some things to become visible to them any more! Science as a means of putting themselves to sleep. Are you acquainted with that? . . .
Now and then people wound scholars to the bone—everyone who associates with them experiences this—with a harmless word. We anger our scholarly friends just when we intend to honour them. We drive them wild, merely because we were too coarse to figure out the people we are really dealing with, suffering people, who don't wish to admit to themselves what they are, narcotised and mindless people, who fear only one thing—coming to consciousness.
Interesting, I should read Nietzsche.
He’s so much deeper than reddit-tier summaries of his thought would have you believe.
I would recommend Twilight of the Idols followed by Genealogy of Morality and then you can look into his other books if you want more.
Schizo ramblings
Pop science is written at an 8th grade level. You grew up, matured and now realize that it always was tripe.
Like seriously. Everybody fell at the same hole.
From altright to globohomosexual liberal (while not even being American), a couple such cases.
>everyone in America is liberal
No
Everything with a biological imperative has a consciousness which stems from the fact there is a greater consciousness which produces consciousness of all living things, i.e., the universe thinks, so we all think as a result of a higher consciousness
>everyone in America is liberal
Never claimed that, I just find Europeans that copy American liberals to be pitiable, unless he is a rootless cosmopolitan like the ones Lasch and Gotfried described.
They're not Christian so they live in contradiction implicitly. My favorite example was Haidt who saw the data for teenage boys and girls with social media and saw that girls were much more severely affected than boys. His conclusion? Regulate for all teenagers. This isn't data-driven and is based on moralideas of equality from a religion he doesn't believe in (Moses says to pay women less too).
Those poeple are for redditors and poeple who are really stupid and conformist and want to larp as muh inteligent and look down on "dumb poeple".Its good you are discustednby it it means you have a functional brain and are not an NPC.
It’s not that what they say is bad or wrong. It’s just that it’s no longer relevant to today’s sociopolitical climate. It’s not what we need right now.
They were relevant in the early 00s. Atheism was still a new concept to a lot of people in America then so they had a good message that people found helpful. But then they ended up winning basically, at least among the educated classes. We’ve moved on. It’s not about religion vs atheism anymore, it’s about insane anti-white activists who want to destroy western civilization. We need a different way of looking at things other than just “lol rationality is great, without religion there would be no problems”.
The older I get the more annoying people that are super “confident”/intractable/stubborn/one-note in their beliefs get.
Also something about grown 40+ adults still bickering about politics or religion is cringey. None of this shit matters.
I dunno about you but it matters to me. There's people in retirement age who still do that. I dunno what universe you're from but you're the exception not the rule
The pathological contrarianism that first brought you to them has taken you away from them once again
Oh look, it's another thread of human beings arguing with p-zombies/hylics.
Because they are frauds, middlebrow pseuds, and pedos. Their arguments are total trash. They know nothing about philosophy. They are quintessentially mediocre, boring thinkers. They have absolutely no understanding of epistemology, metaphysics, or ontology at all. Their books and videos are worthless. They are an absolute joke.
Oy vey conspiracy theories are for idiots like pizza gate yeah pizza gate that's for loonies.
Dawkins looks and sounds like such a creep.
Harris always talks in a NPR voice to try to hypnotize so that you don't realize how stupid his arguments are.
You're just following the lit hivemind. You don't even realise that your brain has been infected by the worms.