bondarchuk

This notion of causality is interesting. When a human claims that he is conscious, there a causal chain from the fact that they are conscious to their claiming so. When a neuron-level simulation of a human claims it is conscious, there must be a similar causal chain, with a similar fact at its origin.

edit: ow, a lot of reverb though... (though it says "(Ohya Stone Quarry, Utsunomiya)" so I guess it's natural) But It's nice to hear this, I sometimes try playing them on sax too (the Trent Kynaston version is best, supposedly).

Another edit: the double stops are a nice touch!

[1] but who am I, it would still be worthwhile to check obviously

So.. get another car. Safety first.

I have one of AIGO EROS Q / EROS K / AGPTek H3 / HIFI WALKER H2 / Surfans F20 with Rockbox and it's great. And the existence of reasonably prices half-terabyte SD cards is obviously a great improvement too.

Did you mean to say "it is not an amount that asml cannot afford to lose" or "it is an amount that asml can afford to lose"?

By talking of a different "nature" you already place the discussion on dualist grounds.

>you have an experience of your existence that you can describe, because you're consciously aware of it.

Certainly. But the way Nagel phrases it, "the experience" becomes akin to a "thing", and the absence of this "thing" in physical nature becomes an argument for the hypothesis that it's highly unlikely (maybe even impossible) to give a physicalist account of consciousness. That is what I disagree with.

>There is, presumably, nothing it is like to be a Tetris game, because a Tetris game has no consciousness.

What does saying this get you over just saying "a Tetris game has no consciousness"?

>This is a standard, widely accepted characterization in consciousness studies. Even if you object to it, you should at least understand what it's saying.

I understand what it is saying only insofar as it is simply another way to say "consciousness". But it is clearly taken to be more than just an alternative phrase we can use in lieu of the words "consciousness" or "subjective experience" to vaguely gesture in the direction of these ill-defined concepts we are all familiar with. I disagree that "there is something it is like to be bondarchuk" has greater descriptory power than "bondarchuk is conscious", therefore I don't think we should draw any conclusions regarding consciousness from this phrasing, especially the conclusion Nagel draws which is that consciousness is highly likely to be non-physical or at least that our current understanding of "the physical" is insufficient to ever approach the problem of consciousness (because we can never hope to give proper account of "the something that it is like to be bondarchuk").

>And if you do object to it, the onus is on you to provide a better description, which I note you've declined to do on multiple occasions now.

Not really; my rejection of Nagel's argument can stand on its own regardless of whether I can offer an alternative argument.

I think you hit the nail on the head here. It's an effective way to codify a metaphysical intuition held by many people. That it would in any way constitute a proof for this intuition of course does not follow at all.

Certainly it's not claiming to define it, but it is making a claim about the existence of the "something", and also about the physical irreducibility of this "something".

You just did! Why would we need to rephrase this and then attach special importance to that new sentence construction, when "the distinction between objects that are conscious and objects that aren't" is perfectly adequate?

Besides, I would not call "there is something it is like to be [...]" a "good and clear" construction. As mentioned on wikipedia, it has 'achieved special status in consciousness studies as "the standard 'what it's like' locution"' - I don't think a specific locution would get special status if it was just any arbitrary way of pointing at what people already understand anyway (i.e. the concept "subjective experience").

>Your highlighted text could be rendered as "An organism has conscious mental states if and only if there is something that is felt being that organism – something that is felt by the organism." and it would be more precise, just doesn't sound elegant in English.

I agree these would be more or less equivalent, and I think your version is still making the same false distinction as Nagel's by positing a distinct "something". Only it does so (commendably) in a more clear and obvious way, thus it would never become the standard phrasing for people looking to sneak in dualist assumptions :)

I doubt Nagel would go out of his way to offer such an unnatural linguistic construction, and other philosophers would adopt this construction as a standard point of reference, if that was the sole intent.

>So then are you saying there is no such thing as consciousness?

No, not at all. I'm only saying that if we want to talk about "the consciousness of a bat", we should talk about it directly, and not invent (implicitly) a second concept that is in some senses distinct from it, and in some sense comparable to it.

I also don't think it's fair to say I'm just quibbling about wording. Yes, I am quibbling about wording, but the quibble is quite essential because the argument depends to such a large extent on wording. There are many other arguments for or against different views of consciousness but they are not the argument Nagel makes.

(Though fwiw I do think consciousness has some illusory aspects - which is only saying so much as "consciousness is different than it appears" and a far cry from "consciousness doesn't exist at all")

That's exactly what I'm saying is erroneous. Consciousness is the first thing, we are only led to believe it is a separate, second thing by a millenia-old legacy of dualism and certain built-in tendencies of mind.