Apologies for the delay in responding. This week was my hack week, and I had Life stuff happening, too.
> If you assume dualism...
Which I don't. My position on this stuff is in the neighborhood of panpsychism or Objective Idealism, but not quite either, and both of which are very much monist notions.
If you weren't accusing me of holding a dualist position, could you please clarify what you're saying here?
> I recommend some meditation on the possible inner lives of a whole spectrum of creatures.
I've actually spent a fair amount of time contemplating the question of the nature of the inner lives of things not-me, thanks. I can't speak to what that experience might be like. Epistemic asymmetry is a thing. What I don't spend much time contemplating is that they have one.
It's interesting, though, that you bring that up — bats, specifically. Please read Nagel's "What is it like to be a bat?" if you haven't already. It's one of the first papers I'm aware of to meaningfully articulate this question. Dennett, himself — the thinker whose oeuvre, and particularly "Consciousness Explained", frames this discussion — called it "the most widely cited and influential thought experiment about consciousness."
So, for clarity, my position goes like this: I have an experience of the thing I mean when I say "consciousness" — this "inner life", which, until I'm convinced is somehow a delusion, I will continue to regard as the only direct experience I have. On the principle that solipsism is bullshit, I assume that the other beings like me with whom I share the world also have this 'inner life' thing going on.
Additionally, I see in the world other things which are clearly "beings", but which are, to varying degrees, not like me and the other beings I assume have inner lives. What about them is different, such that they wouldn't have this experience? Is it language? Many have that. Tool use? More than a few. Warm blood? (See: "Do Fish Feel Pain?")
It is, I submit, most parsimonious to assume consciousness of some form on their part, as well. When someone suggests otherwise, they're making a positive assertion, not merely that this imaginary line between "conscious" and "not conscious" goes in that specific place, but that there is a line in the first place, and must justify both.
> I would argue that our introspection is just as vulnerable to mistake, confabulation, and delusion as our awareness of the external world.
Of course it is. I don't think that's even in question. But that's actually my point: when you're introspecting, that's "you", there, in that moment, on that ride. Whether the things you're introspecting about are materially reflective of their antecedents, whether you're thinking clearly or biasedly, whether even your entire narrative in that moment, if not always, is just so much self-serving bullshit, does not matter. You're still introspecting.
That's what I mean when I say the content doesn't matter. Whatever I'm experiencing, true or false, I'm still experiencing.
The question no-one can answer to my satisfaction — all this hand-wringing about its being irrelevant, or illusory, or even incorrect notwithstanding — is how, if the only "things" that matter are reducible to observable, measurable, falsifiable phenomena, it should feel at all.
Because the thing I most want those tools to explain is how I can be here, in existence, having the experience of being here questioning my existence at all.
There is precisely nothing in this kind of reductive ontology that can account for the fact that there is a qualitative nature to my being at all. And yet it is the most direct experience I have. Not what I see, that I see. And, yes, the emotional associations I have with what I see, upon seeing it. Of course that comes from a different part of the brain. Yet I feel that too.
That's the question I want answered — the very thing being hand-waved away.