Comment by naasking | Hacker News Reader

Comment by naasking | Hacker News Reader

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> To me, the fact that illusion and hallucination are being invoked is strong evidence of handwaving being engaged in to dismiss an otherwise difficult problem.

Dennett doesn't dismiss the difficulty of the problem, he just dismisses that the difficulty is where people think it is. For instance, he would fully agree that the brain is insanely complex and just elaborating how information processing works will be very, very challenging. His opponents then say from this position of ignorance on how this works, "but even if you explain all of this, there's still something left to explain!"

Is there really though? How could they possibly know this? It's a classic god of the gaps argument/argument from ignorance that theists use to cling to their deities or support intelligent design, hence "residual christianity". After all of this time debating consciousness, the very best arguments we have for qualia that cannot be captured mechanistically are thought experiments that are easily dismissed as circular (and which Dennett has ably deconstructed to show their vacuousness).

Frankly, I find Dennett's rebuttals are brutally logical and pragmatic.

If one is a "phenomenological zombie", i.e. does not have subjective experience (SE), then Dennett's position is the only one that makes any sense. The only thing to explain, is why others are believing this SE illusion.

Those of us who do have SE, and have recognized it, know something the zombies cannot know: that SE must exist.

No, you have a perception that you think entails subjective experience. Surely you would acknowledge the many ways you or others could fool your other perceptions, but it's frankly confusing that you think this simply cannot happen to your perception of subjective awareness. The fact is, if this illusion was adaptive in evolutionary terms, which it arguably is, then you would have developed such an illusory perception.

>but it's frankly confusing that you think this simply cannot happen to your perception of subjective awareness

Because subjective awareness is not a perception, they're two entirely different kinds of of concepts. Equating the two would seems stranger to me than equating say the feeling of pain with the concept of a needle. You could convince me both the needle and the pain are illusionary, but not that my experience is. That you seem to be genuinely convinced that subjective experience and our flawed sensory apparatuses are even in the same ballpark implies to me that you probably either do not have that experience, or that unlike in my case, your experience is somehow not connected to the output that typing fingers can produce

> Because subjective awareness is not a perception, they're two entirely different kinds of of concepts.

Not under eliminative materialism.

> You could convince me both the needle and the pain are illusionary, but not that my experience is.

The ineffability of the experience of the pain is the qualia that needs explanation, the rest are all compatible with mechanistic explanations. It is the ineffable quality that disappears under any serious scrutiny.

Edit: if you want to understand how eliminativism can work scientifically, I suggested reading this paper:

The attention schema theory: a mechanistic account of subjective awareness, http://journal.frontiersin.org/article/10.3389/fpsyg.2015.00...

An analogy for tech nerds would be how the illusion of multitasking on a single CPU machine arises from imperceptibly fast context switching. Something similar happens in that theory, where our perceptual faculties are constantly switching between perceptual signals from our internal representation of the world, and the perceptual signals from our senses.

Recognizing one's subjective experience (SE), entails knowing for certain that it exists.

That true statement is definitely not an argument in favor SE; it would be of no evidentiary value to a zombie, for example.

If and when you, naasking, have SE and recognize it: it's existence will then be impossible to doubt.

Nice try, but there cannot be any test for zombie.

Of course the zombie would pretend they experience SE and some will even loudly disagree with the referenced article.

I'm specifically referring to reviews and comments Dennet has made of the work of totally secular, atheist or agnostic , non Christian philosphers of mind and neuroscientists. He literally just tosses insults around in some of his reviews and it's kinda pathetic that such an eminent scholar engages in such tactics.

Overall, He does dismiss the hard problem, calling it stage magic. This is exactly the tactic you might imagine an intelligent man would use after having spent a lifetime to fail to explain anything meaningful.

> Overall, He does dismiss the hard problem, calling it stage magic.

Because it is stage magic given his theory of mind, which he elaborated 30 years ago. I would certainly like to see these insults though if you could provide a citation.

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