/lit/ - Literature

[Anonymous No.22617060]

Is this book really making the case I think it is?

I wasn't sure so I watched a YouTube series by Keith Frankish and read this

>https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&source=web&rct=j&opi=89978449&url=https://keithfrankish.github.io/articles/Frankish_Illusionism%2520as%2520a%2520theory%2520of%2520consciousness_eprint.pdf&ved=2ahUKEwiPv5GPv4GCAxXQB4gKHTj2CwoQFnoECC0QAQ&usg=AOvVaw3E9m6T0Qp71Z93mFz7tzmK

Paper, and yep, they really are making the claim I think they are.

Now I just have to say this is literally the dumbest most retarded philosophy I've ever heard in my entire life. More retarded than any religion, and shit about ghosts even flat earthers are more rational than this.

Basically this is what happens when you're a reddit faggot and your scientism goes so far that you literally lose your fucking mind.

I got the exact cure to prove this """philosophy"" wrong - literally kick these idiots in the fucking face Hahahahahaa it actually makes me MAD how fucking dumb this is.

Imagine being so committed to physicalism you lose your fucking mind!

[Anonymous No.22617077]

>>22617060
Yeah it's incredibly dumb and they don't actually believe it either though they'd insist they do on pain of death. Committing to these kinds of ideologies is a deep level of larping and active self denial. It's incredibly immature and reddit shit exactly as you described. These are the "intellectuals" of our time.

[Anonymous No.22617114]

>>22617077
I watched a YouTube video with Daniel Dennet in it and all the comments are like

>when he speaks, I listen
>fascinating to listen to one of the greatest intellectuals of our time
>his insights are incredible
>(see pic)

Are these people fucking retarded or just don't understand what he's actually saying? He's an eliminative materialist. He denies phenomenal consciousness. He literally thinks reports such as "I am seeing a pink flower" are based on am introspective illusion that predisposes someone to make this report WHEN THERES NOTHING CONSCIOUS THERE NO PINK FLOWER NO SENSATION


good God this is so dumb I mean how can you say this? I am literally looking at a pink flower right now how could this possibly be an illusion? And note He doesn't mean this in the sense that "science will show that the brain constructs our experiences in such a way that they seem different to how they actually are (eg, change blindness, the focal point is smaller, there are colour illusions etc), but quite literally THAT I am phenomenally conscious is itself an illusion. there is no sensation AT ALL

God i want to go find him and kick him in the face and make him tell me the pain sensation is fucking real I'll kick him over and over AHHH HELL REACT AND SQUIRM AROUND AHHHH YOU SEE??? YOU SEE OP PAIN IS JUST MY BEHAVIOUR!!! I WIN I WIN !!! MY SCREAMING PROVES IT PHYSICALISM WINS!!! I'll listen to his cries with pleasure then strap his faggot ass down and tape his eyes and mouth shut and inject him with immobilizers so he CANT react then I'll pinch and I'll stab him and I'll twist his
nipples around and poke his eyes and watch him lay there with zero reactions then whisper in his ears YEAH I KNOW YOU FEEL THAT PAIN SENSATION YOU LYING BITCH IT FUCKING HURTS DOESNT IT CUNT!!! REACTIONS OR NOT YOU FUCKING FEEL IT DONT YAA!!!!! HAHAJAHAHA then I'll take my knife and cut his fuckinf head off and when they take me to jail I'll simply explain to the judge I killed an automaton and it's no different than shutting down a computer and when they look at me incredulous I'll make them read dennets own fucking writing making the case for me, and I'll be set free.

But deep down I know and he fucking knows just how much it hurt when I viciously killed him and got a fucking way with it HAHAHAHAHAHAHA fuck your physicalism NIGGER

[Anonymous No.22617117]

>>22617114
Pic

[Anonymous No.22617136]

>>22617060
>>22617077
>>22617114
All you've managed is a slew of ad hominem attacks. You don't even go over this guy's theory or what about it pisses you off so much. Honestly I don't care about this dude and will likely never read his book, but the least you could do is a tldr. No I will not click on your link, use your own words. Stop pissing and moaning like a baby if you want an actual conversation here.

[Anonymous No.22617138]

>>22617114
I fully understand being extremely mad about intellectual stupidity like this. In the end you just gotta move on though as there's no penetrating the 1000ft thick self-repairing wall of contradictions and hidden assumptions and non-sequiturs people like this are using to keep anyone, including themselves, from ever having to face the fact that they're just very obviously wrong.

I think the youtube commenters probably don't comprehend what he's actually saying for the most part. If you try to talk to most people about deep philosophical issues like this, even really smart people, you start to realize they aren't really processing what you're saying or even what they're saying. And if you push them to the point of actually trying to comprehend, in clear language that they understand, the questions being asked, they'll almost always either get mad or find some way of ending the conversation. Most people simply don't ever think about things like this in a serious, ordered, lucid way and they seem to have some kind of primal fear of it.

People like him and his intellectual buddies and the .0001% of redditors and youtuber commenters who actually fully understand the thesis though are just in deep deep deep denial. They can't let go of their central tenet whether it be empiricism, some kind of epistemological system they've based their whole worldview and way of thinking around, physicalism, or some retarded faith in the consensus of their community of fellow retards. They're in their own hell. Just let them be and go outside.

[Anonymous No.22617142]

>>22617136
Dennet is an eliminative materialist about consciousness - i.e. he asserts that consciousness does not exist and is only an illusory byproduct of purely physical processes which is itself only a physical process. There is no consciousness. It's incredibly hard to even write out the thesis in a sentence because it's so blatantly contradictory you have to twist yourself in a knot as I just did to avoid using words that belie the fact that you are inherently assuming an observer in the thesis itself (I actually fuck up by using the word "illusion" which itself implies an observer but I can't be bothered to formulate this ultimately nonsensical thesis in any better way). It's pants on head retarded. It's not even a coherent idea which is why it's so hard to write out. SCIENCE.

[Anonymous No.22617153]

>>22617136
Relax buddy I'm just memeing. Essentially the theory is sort of the radical endpoint of physicalism. You take the hard problem of consciousness which is the inability to reconcile subjective phenomenonolgy with the "atoms and void" physicalist picture of the world, and the response is to say well.. subjectively phenomenonology doesn't exist. We are physical brains that are predisposed to make reports such as "I am seeing a red flower" not because a sensation of red or sight of a flower is actually experienced, but because non-phenomenal cognitive processes are going on in a brain which represent to itself (non experientially) a representation of a flower. It's a bit like when you screenshot your pc screen, the computer isn't actually "taking a picture", rather there is just a physical substrate (whatever electrical nerd shit that happens something to do with gates or something I forgot, but it's represented as binary language) that changes. Dennet is saying, there is no picture. Just the substrate. You ask a computer what the screenshot looks like it may say red and blue and describe the image but there's nothing phenomenal going on. It's dead inside.

That's basically the theory of illusionism. No reds no greens no sensations no nothing. Just internal non-phenomal states that we report as phenomenal.

[Anonymous No.22617163]

>>22617142
In my opinion this is the most coherent form of phyaicalism. It's obviously wrong but I don't see any other way for physicalism to survive. David Chalmers gets written off by the redditors as "woo-woo" but he makes a strong case that of we accept phenomenal states (how could you not?) then physicalism must fail and we are left with either dualism or idealism.

[Anonymous No.22617165]

>>22617138
What if they're actually p-zombies? Is it really so ridiculous? If someone makes a whole career out of saying he isn't conscious, why don't we just.. believe him?

[Anonymous No.22617208]

>>22617114
>>22617142
You seem well educated on this matter anon. Any books you would recommend that would state a case as to why someone like Dennet's philosophy is flawed? I'm intrigued after witnessing how passionately opposed you feel to his views.

[Anonymous No.22617210]

>>22617060
So whats the clam the book is making?

[Anonymous No.22617220]

>>22617142
>Dennet is an eliminative materialist about consciousness - i.e. he asserts that consciousness does not exist.

Nope, go read the book.

He is eliminativist about qualia but you assume qualia are consciousness BECAUSE YOU CANT GET IT IN YOUR HEAD that qualia is a concept that referes to phenomenal aspect of it.
If you had any idea you would knew there is 4 different conceptions of qualia btw. And Dennet attacks 1 of those 3.

You are literaly strawmaning the guy by saying he denys sky because he denys baloons that float in it.

I droped Dennets view long ago but boi do i hate posters like you.

[Anonymous No.22617236]

>>22617208
>book
Any book will do. Or anything not a book. Literally any experience is a complete irrefutable disproof of the idea.

>>22617220
Meh whatever. It's been a decade since I read this stuff, I can't remember exactly who is retarded in which way. There are people who hold to the type of eliminativism I wrote about so consider my comments directed towards them.

[Anonymous No.22617242]

>>22617236
Here is your Keith then. To refresh your memory.
https://youtu.be/zPKKGPRGRFs?si=-OApUD19cB2QVyI0

[Anonymous No.22617246]

>>22617220
No idea even what you're saying but pic is frankish conception of Dennets view

[Anonymous No.22617250]

>>22617060
>OP pretends not to be some type of abrahamic wormbrain in order to seethe at (correct) physicalists

[Anonymous No.22617251]

>>22617246
Frankish describes dennets illusionism

[Anonymous No.22617253]

>>22617246
Good then both of you should read the actual book.

[Anonymous No.22617254]

>>22617251
Dennet responds in his own paper "why illusionism is the default theory of consciousness"

[Anonymous No.22617261]

>>22617242
GitHub Pages
https://keithfrankish.github.io › ...PDF
Illusionism as a Theory of Consciousness* - Keith Frankish

Just read this

[Anonymous No.22617265]

>>22617261
Dennets paper

These guys are literally denying exactly what people say they are.

Of course everyone is top lazy to read their papers or skim their books and thinks "they can't be ! It must be something else!" And when you show them evidence that actually, they're fucking retarded they just GO LALALALLALALAA THEY DONT MEAN IT LIKE THAT!!!!

[Anonymous No.22617268]

>>22617242
If Dennet's view is as described by this guy it doesn't remove any problems for physicalism, it's just kicking the can down the road. Getting rid of the stuff of experience but not addressing the undeniable (by definition) existence of the experiencer, i.e. consciousness, awareness, whatever word you want to use.
>it's producing an impression on you that's misleading
>an impression on you
Who is this "you" he admits into his ontology? Surely not some "SpoOoOoKy" non-physical entity.....

These people are the embodiment of midwittery.

[Anonymous No.22617277]

>>22617268
>Remove any problems for physicalism

Nore did anyone claim it will.

>kicking the can down the road.

That is preaty much whole of PoM to begin with

>Who is this you

Clearly the body (particulary brain)

[Anonymous No.22617280]

>>22617265
Nope. He is denying your conception of it, not the phenomena:)

As said many times on this forum. Illusions them self exist, they just misrepresent what is happening.

[Anonymous No.22617282]

>>22617277
>Nore did anyone claim it will.
Obviously that's their intent. Don't be obtuse.
>Clearly the body (particulary brain)
And there's the hard problem again. No progress. Meaningless nonsense view that doesn't even attempt to answer the question. Just muddies the waters to generate updoots and justify tenure.

[Anonymous No.22617289]

>>22617282
>And there's the hard problem again. No progress. Meaningless nonsense view that doesn't even attempt to answer the question. Just muddies the waters to generate updoots and justify tenure.

Hahaha funny that you say this after i just fucking told you there is hard problem only if you conceptualise consciousness as and separate aspecr of reallity.

Why.. why is this so hard to understand?
Why cant you see that HPC exists only if you assume there is two aspects of mind that are not reducible one to another.
A conception which is argued against by eliminativists and thus cannor be aplyed to the story of physicalists SINCE THEY DONT EVEN HOLD SAME ONTOLOGICAL ASSUMPTIONS GOD FUCKING DAMNIT.

[Anonymous No.22617293]

>>22617280
To anyone reading this retards posts, see pic for dennets explicit position this. The illusion is that there are phenomenal properties entirely. This is dennets view, this is frankishs view and this is literally what illusionism is.

[Anonymous No.22617297]

>>22617289
I'm gonna ignore the fact that you just admitted the view is exactly as I described it here >>22617142 so we can move on, but just so you're aware. I noticed.
>only if you assume
It's not an assumption it's an observation. And the obvious way to resolve it is idealism which does the same thing as what you're pretending eliminative materialism can do but without the obvious problem of contravening the single most evident and undeniable proposition - that the experiencer is - which btw thereby makes the entire premise of EM literally nonsensical.

[Anonymous No.22617301]

>>22617297
>I'm gonna ignore the fact that you just admitted the view is exactly as I described it here

Yes go on and close your self into echochamber even more.

[Anonymous No.22617311]

>>22617136
Not that anon, but to be honest that's the best kind of treatment eliminativism is entailed to. It is really that stupid, by giving a serious answer you're already conceding too much to them.

[Anonymous No.22617319]

>>22617060
Are you going to actually explain it and what's wrong with it and why?

[Anonymous No.22617322]

>>22617142
>(I actually fuck up by using the word "illusion" which itself implies an observer but I can't be bothered to formulate this ultimately nonsensical thesis in any better way).
Both Dennett and Frankish actually use the term "illusion" (going as far as dubbing their brand of eliminativism "illusionism", they both have papers on this exact topic) so you've made no mistake in your post. It's funny that you felt ashamed in saying something as stupid as "consciousness is an illusion", even tho they are actually making a claim as retarded as this one. They're really hopeless.
Btw Dennett is aware of the "illusion of phenomenical consciousness already entails phenomenical consciousness" objection, since Searle made it. Dennett's response was of course very stupid, and boiled down to "maybe it's true, maybe it's not, we have to wait for science to tell us". Again, a complete retard.

Personally I think he knows eliminativism is completely idiotic. He probably wanted to play devil's advocate for science (since he knew that reductive materialism is bunk, and therefore only eliminativist materialism was left as an option for the physicalist), and hoped that by thinking enough about the issue he might have found a valid defense for eliminativism. Ofc he didn't, and went in to deep to retract his position (since doing it rn would basically be akin to admitting that he wasted his life on an evidently idiotic position).

[Anonymous No.22617327]

>>22617293
This is literaly what i am telling you all the time. But you just cant get your head out of framework on which Chalmers works.

[Anonymous No.22617328]

>>22617322
Btw I would add that the eliminativists tend to be very dishonest, since they seem to believe that the hard problem of consciousness only applies to phenomenical consciousness.
In actuality it applies also to all forms of intentionality, meaning that talking about illusions would be very stupid even if the Searle's objection I have mentioned in the previous post was false.
I really sympathize with Galen Strawson, when be said that eliminativism had to be the dumbest position in the history of philosophy. I really cannot think of a dumber one

[Anonymous No.22617338]

>>22617322
Makes me happy to have immediately arrived at the same objection as Searle. His arguments always stuck out to me as one tiny flash of piercing common sense in the sea of midwit gymnastics that is western phil.

[Anonymous No.22617347]

>>22617319
Dennet denies the existence of phenomenal sensations.

I'm saying this is fucking retarded

[Anonymous No.22617349]

>>22617338
Please do not mistake analytic philosophy with western philosophy. Analytic phil is just a fucked up anglo fad that will probably die in less than a century. In the scope of the history of western philosophy it's just a retarded blurb

[Anonymous No.22617360]

What's even more retarded to me than the actual position (which is really, really fucking retarded) is the means by which it is reached

>born
>live entire life experiencing phenomenal sensations
>go to r/scientism
>learn about atoms and physics
>holy shit this explains everything!
>David Chalmers: what ablut the scientific observations themselves that you use to posit the physical world?
>hmmm
>well... physicalism simply MUST be true so I guess it just HAS to be the case that I don't observe or see or feel or touch!
>hahaha God those other philosophers are so dumb.. arguing about magic theories!! It's all just atoms in the head retards!!

Any rational person would be like, physicalism can't account for my experience so either the theory needs to be reworked or discarded. These illusionist idiots just take physicalism as axiomatic and everything must be denied or obfuscated, even their own fucking directly felt sensations, to preserve the theory. It's maddening in how retarded it is.

[Anonymous No.22617370]

>>22617349
I prefer analytic midwittery to continental fart sniffing. At least analytics are genuinely trying to solve problems through an intellectually honest application of logic. Those problems are obviously unsolvable, and there are obvious skeptical objections that clearly can't be resolved which makes the whole thing at best an exercise in building the biggest propositional lego tower, but that's still better than continentals. Continentals are just blabbing jargon from their personal private languages at eachother and refusing to explain what they actually mean because that would be "essentialism" or some shit and pumping their shit full of poeticisms and rhetorical emotional bullshit to make up for never making a coherent argument.

They're both shit but pick your poison I guess. I wouldn't have a problem with continental if they just admitted they're really just writing weird niche poetry and not actually making arguments.

[Anonymous No.22617386]

>>22617370
My advice is to reject this very stupid distinction, and focus on the classics of western philosophy. They will quickly show you that the analytical method is bunk, and that their use of "intuitions" as an argumentative criterion boils down the entire tradition to sophistry.

[Anonymous No.22617427]

>>22617060
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3gvwhQMKvro

[Anonymous No.22617437]

>>22617360
>These illusionist idiots just take physicalism as axiomatic
Pic related is an eliminativist who literally admits his belief in physicalism is a matter of faith.

https://reducing-suffering.org/the-many-fallacies-of-dualism/#A_matter_of_faith

> Yes, I like to say that I have faith in one thing: The existence of physics. Dualists have faith in two things: Physics and extra-physical mind stuff. Non-physicalist theists have faith in three things: Those two plus God / Holy Spirit / gods / etc. Or maybe many things if you include angels and demons and all the rest.

> The presuppositionalists are right that there are no neutral assumptions to ground epistemology. Fundamentally it comes down to a matter of faith. Some people feel their experiences can't be explained without appeal to a Heavenly Father, and they insist that no amount of these other ontological components can make up for Him. They can feel divine presence, and how could this fundamental perception be in error?

[Anonymous No.22617439]

>>22617437
https://longtermrisk.org/the-eliminativist-approach-to-consciousness/#Denying_consciousness_altogether

[Anonymous No.22618622]

Itt: Cartesian crybaby dualists

[Anonymous No.22618647]

>>22617437
You want a real laugh? Read his dating profile. The guy is a complete fucking weirdo.

>https://briantomasik.com/my-dating-profile/

[Anonymous No.22618661]

>>22617437
Also I find it utterly absurd that someone who denies the existence of phenomenal suffering appears to have written 3847433 essays on how to reduce it!

[Anonymous No.22618717]

>>22617293
"There is no red stripe *anywhere*" is not the same as "there is no red stripe" and when he uses the phrase "seem to see" it doesn't mean what you think it does. Thanks for confirming that you have no idea what you're reading.

Are you OP? I used to tell people to actually read Dennett and Frankish before spouting this tired bullshit we see all the time in consciousness threads. I don't do that anymore, because most of you only get filtered.

How about you only read Quining Qualia up to the point where Dennett says: "Everything real has properties, and since I don't deny the reality of conscious experience, I grant that conscious experience has properties."? You can stop after that, you'll only get confused when you try to read further.

Same with Frankish's lectures on youtube. After he tells you that he doesn't deny the existence of consciousness, stop watching. Your understanding already peaked and you'll only get confused by trying to continue.

[Anonymous No.22618752]

>>22618717
The fuck are you talking about?

So many of you retards just can't accept what these guys have plainly written

Umm Mr dennet aren't you just denying consciousness???
>NO IM NOT CONSCIOUSNESS EXISTS I NEVER SAID THAT!!!
well you just redefined it in such a way that it means there is nothing phenomenally it is like to be me..
>STILL DIDNT DENY IT DID I??? HUH??? IM NOT DENYING IT !!!
okay but you're basically saying what it is like for me to represent things is no different than what it is like for a hard drive to contain an image - there's nothing phenomenal going on...
>STILL DIDNT DENY IT!!!!
but dennet I just so obviously have phenomenal states I don't understand how you could deny this, you clearly have them too retard and the smug sense in which you privilege your physicalist ontology over mine and your direct experience is incredibly annoying
>DID I JUST HEAR YOU SAY YOU OBVIOUSLY HAVE PHENOMENAL STATES? NICE FIRST PERSON RETARD RETARD ILL BE USING THAT AS PART AS MY SCIENCE OF HETEROPHENOMENOLOGY ILL ACCOUNT IT FOR ILL EXPLAIN IT AWAY HAHAHHAHA YOU FUCKING IDIOT REPROTING MENTAL STATES!!! I CAN EXPLAIN THESS REPORTS AWAY!!!!
dude you're a fucking retard
>HAHAHHAHA BUY MY BOOKS ZOMBIE!!!

[Anonymous No.22618765]

>>22617060
>>22617114
>>22617138
>>22617142
>>22617153
>>22617163
>>22617165
>>22617208
>>22617236
>>22617242
>>22617265
>>22617268
Why do you post on /lit/ when you don't read books autistic low iq christcuck.
Mods ban these clueless autistics that shit up the board constantly with their non reading related fixation

[Anonymous No.22618767]

>>22618717
>How about you only read Quining Qualia up to the point where Dennett says: "Everything real has properties, and since I don't deny the reality of conscious experience, I grant that conscious experience has properties."? You can stop after that, you'll only get confused when you try to read further.
I suggest you to read later papers, he got far more opinionated in the last 2 decades. Check for example Illusionism as the Obvious Default Theory of Consciousness.
I won't comment on Frankish, since I genuinely think he is a very confused thinker who does not really know what he is saying. Talking with him IRL only dramatically strengthened this impression of mine.

[Anonymous No.22618777]

>>22617439
> While I became convinced that non-reductive accounts of consciousness could not be right based mainly on philosophical arguments, it was after reading neuroscience that I actually internalized the eliminativist world view. The gestalt shift toward eliminativism requires time and reading to sink in.

Bro read a neuroscience textbook then his mind fell out of his head...

[Anonymous No.22618786]

>>22618767
Frankish is extremely clear what he's actually saying in "illusionism as a theory of consciousness."

Pic related is enlightening. Phenomenal states are seem by him as "embarrassing" to a materialist account of the world. And so must simply be denied. Imagine being so committed to an ontology you deny your own mind..

[Anonymous No.22618793]

>>22617439
>Ethics in this world view involves valuing or disvaluing various operations within the symphony of physics to different degrees. Some philosophers assign value based on the beauty, complexity, or interestingness of the physics that they see. Those who value conscious welfare instead aim to attribute degrees of sentience to different parts of physics and then value them based on the apparent degree of happiness or suffering of those sentient minds. Because it's mistaken to see consciousness as a concrete thing, sentience-based valuation, like the other valuation approaches, involves a projection in the mind of the person doing the valuing. But this shouldn't be so troubling, because metaethical anti-realists already knew that ethics as a whole was a projection by the moral agent. The eliminativist position just adds that the thing being (dis)valued, consciousness, is itself something of a fiction of the moral agent's invention.

This is the guy making how to video guides on how to squash bugs on YouTube (unironcally)

[Anonymous No.22618814]

>>22618647
this is obviously a troll. there's no way someone is this retarded and this much of a bugman

[Anonymous No.22618827]

>>22618765
Lol, one of the mods is a christcuck who often makes these shitty threads. It's never going to get fixed.

[Anonymous No.22618856]

>>22618752
lmao
>>22618767
I have. Both of them explicitly maintain that consciousness is real, otherwise they wouldn't labor to explain it, now would they? They only differ with qualia realists a bit in what exactly the explanandum is. The difference is subtle, but it definitely includes the existence of anything that is directly given in experience. If you see some fundamental contradiction / confusion there, consider the possibility that it might be of your own making and make some effort to see things from their perspective. The problem is that illusionism is just that: a different perspective that can't be neatly summed up. You need to first entertain and then seriously consider the idea that conscious experience isn't as abundant, cohesive and, most importantly, transparent, as it naively seems. And then the idea that first-person "data" can be deflated to beliefs.

Try to understand that too quickly and you won't be able to reconcile it with the obvious facts of experience. Work at it with good will and effort and you'll doubt some of the "obvious" and see the rest of it in a different light.
>>22618786
lol filtered

[Anonymous No.22618860]

>>22618814
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=QVgR7lAs9ig

Here he is recording a dying fly then squashing it 50 times like a fucking autist

These are the EXACT type of people who gravitate towards eliminativism. Total fucking autistic weirdos

[Anonymous No.22618884]

>>22618860
HOLY KEK
what a fucking sperg

[Anonymous No.22618960]

>>22618860
Read the comments and check out some of his other vids too. Shit's fucking bizarre. This dude and the people conglomerating around him are actual robot-tier psychopaths who are some reason intellectually obsessed with utilitarian suffering calculus. What a terrible world they must exist in. Less severe gradations of this type of shit is why I didn't pursue philosophy. When you use your intellect too much in a certain way it very clearly fucks you up and makes you into a miserable creature.

[Anonymous No.22618965]

>>22618786
Frankish is extremely clear as long as you do not press him too hard on what he actually mean by his own concepts and commitments. Again, from personally experience I rate him at the level of an undergrad student (the only difference being that he just happened to read lots of terrible scholarship).
The blurb you've posted is a good example of how shallow he is as a thinker (and in this I agree with your judgement on it). Just like Dennett his commitments mostly boil down to rhetorics. You, rightly so, highlighted the term "embarassing" (this is a trope that goes back to Russell and Ryle: the philosopher who is afraid of looking like a dumbass in front of scientists), but the word "magic" is imho even more relevant here. That's the word he uses when something does not fit his very shallow ontology.
To me this is false clarity, or to put it in even more blunt terms, it is mere sophistry: he talks as if he is a lawyer trying to trick a jury into agreeing with his case. But behind this attempt there is absolutely no substance.
Unfortunately this is a very common attitude among analytic philosophers (personally I would advise everybody to immediately treat the philosopher they're reading as a sophist-crooked lawyer as soon as the notion of "intuition" is invoked), but with eliminativist physicalists this attitude is presented in an even more extreme form. Hell, I would go as far as saying that this is a common trope among most hardcore analytic physicalists.

Sorry for all this vitriol, but I really do not respect these people in the slightest, especially after having actually had discussions with them.

[Anonymous No.22618978]

>>22618965
off topic but I don't see why you're repeatedly pointing to intuition as used in the analytic tradition as such a problem. It just means "I just think it's right, i unno", that's an honest phenomenological description of a capacity we have and every philosopher is depending on it primarily whether they name it or not.

[Anonymous No.22619002]

>>22618978
>>22618965
btw, I do see why it's such a problem epistemically - that's what I was referring to here >>22617370 when I talked about there being obvious and insoluble skeptical problems that the tradition simply won't address, I just don't see why you keep pointing it out as though it's a problem for analytic epistemology in particular, as it seems to me it's a problem for anyone who uses any logical structure to think about anything, or who uses language to discuss anything.

[Anonymous No.22619020]

>>22618856
>Both of them explicitly maintain that consciousness is real, otherwise they wouldn't labor to explain it, now would they? They only differ with qualia realists a bit in what exactly the explanandum is.
I think you're making a bit of a sleight of hand when you talk about consciousness in general instead of phenomenal consciousness. Of course anyone who gives serious thought to it knows they cannot be separated (and anyone with a bit of philosophical sophistication will see that the hard problem applies not only to phenomenal consciousness, but also to all forms of intentionality), but this is not the case of Dennett and Frankish. The point here is that when they try to separate the two they end up with a notion of consciousness that simply does not work, and has no bearing on reality.
>If you see some fundamental contradiction / confusion there, consider the possibility that it might be of your own making and make some effort to see things from their perspective.
Ugh, this can be said about literally any conceivable position.
>The problem is that illusionism is just that: a different perspective that can't be neatly summed up
Of course, since it is incoherent and not tenable in the slightest. It truly is a dumb position, which stems from a reasonable commitment (namely the commitment to physicalism), which should have been abandoned once these consequences had been discovered. Unfortunately both Dennett and Frankish based their entire careers on this commitment, so now they can't back up. Studying them is fine, but my advice to you is to not get bogged down by their personal failure, especially if you're already publishing your texts. There's nothing worse for a philosopher to be associated with a stupid theory, and being unable to back down from it without destroying your reputation in the process.
>You need to first entertain and then seriously consider the idea that conscious experience isn't as abundant, cohesive and, most importantly, transparent, as it naively seems. And then the idea that first-person "data" can be deflated to beliefs.
I could expand on this one, but the reference to beliefs is already a non-starter, since the arguments used for the hard problem of phenomenal consciousness easily apply to any form of intentional consciousness too. I'll add that the defender of phenomenal consciousness does not need to argue for the transparence of qualia, but only for their presence. This claim alone is enough to demolish Quining Qualia.

Anyway, again, sorry if I sound vitriolic. I'm not angry at you (it's fine to me if you're an eliminativist or simply someone who respects this position – it's only fine for students to entertain these ideas, especially when people keep telling them that Dennett is an intelligent philosopher), my dismissal is mostly directed at Dennett (on the other hand I pity Frankish, I see him as a not too bright man who get tricked into putting all his eggs in the wrong basket).

[Anonymous No.22619028]

>>22618960
The weirdest part is why would you really care about suffering so much if it's not real in the phenomenal sense? It would seem if there's no intrinsic phenomenal quality to pain and misery, the moral impetus to prevent it is lost. What are you even doing? Trying to prevent physical brain systems from going into functional states?

[Anonymous No.22619036]

>>22619028
He's pretty clearly autistic. I think he just happened upon "suffering" as his autistic niche interest.

[Anonymous No.22619051]

>>22617060
rarely does a single meme obliterate an entire persons body of work so easily

[Anonymous No.22619069]

>>22618965
Does he talk with that whispy "cool-whip" stewie griffin manner irl as he does on youtube?

[Anonymous No.22619080]

>>22618978
>It just means "I just think it's right, i unno"
Which, as a premise, is only fit for a rhetorical argument (which is to say: it is completely irrelevant when it comes to actual philosophical thought).
>that's an honest phenomenological description of a capacity we have and every philosopher is depending on it primarily whether they name it or not.
First of all, I would contest the use of the word "capacity" here. If by it you just mean that it's something we can do, then that's fair. But if you're actually attributing to it any veritative value, then I would ask you on what ground would you possibly make this claim (as in, the claim for which intuitions are conducive to truth – read the last paragraph of this post before responding to what I have just said, it might clear some misunderstandings on what I actually mean).
>>22619002
>I just don't see why you keep pointing it out as though it's a problem for analytic epistemology in particular, as it seems to me it's a problem for anyone who uses any logical structure to think about anything, or who uses language to discuss anything.
I would ask you the same question as above. Regarding why I target analytic philosophy in particular, it is because large swathes of it explicitly accept intuitions in their methodology, while most other traditions at the very least tried to avoid it. This explicit acceptance normalizes the complete absence of any attempt in striving for genuine truth, and for genuine philosophical thought.
If it were true that all our thought so far relied on premises that relied on intuitions as premises, then this would be a problem to be solved, rather than something to be accepted for either academic clout or out of intellectual laziness.

I'll concede this: intuitions can be very useful when it comes to practical methodology (e.g. when we think "this seems true to me, so let's see wether it is actually tenable"). But when intuitions are used as premises (e.g. "from x follows y; but y goes against my intuitions; therefore not-x") then I really think we are outside of the domain of philosophy, and have entered the domain of sophistry.

[Anonymous No.22619081]

>>22618860
this is single handily the most sociopathic-autistic thing i have ever seen

[Anonymous No.22619091]

>>22619069
Honestly I don't hear the stewie griffin analogy, but yeah he talks like that IRL

[Anonymous No.22619096]

why is the hard problem so kino bros? could read about this great debate for days (even if physicalist-materialists are extreme autistic hylics)

god I love being animated, life is good

[Anonymous No.22619132]

>>22619020
>I'll add that the defender of phenomenal consciousness does not need to argue for the transparence of qualia,

Not him and I don't even know what transparence means but I just skimmed quining qualia and it seemed like the arguments were about memory?

So theres an orange sleeping 50 centimeters in front of me. It seems like all the arguments are putting doubt into the notion that there is, or at least that I have some way of confirming that if I close me eyes and look, and then open them again that the first orange I see is the same as the second orange. I guess there's no way of REALLY confirming if maybe I close my eyes, the orange changes but all my memories of previous orange changes so it seems familiar when I open them again. Or if the orange just stays the same.

I mean if I understand right this is the argument? But there's still something I'm seeing (obviously) I mean it's right there bright orange. And does anyone even think "orange qualia" is this constant stable purely mental thing? It always changes due to light levels, my position my focus etc, and isn't "in my mind" but rather I see orange in the world around me, and the theory is this is arises out of a relation between my sensory organs/brain/and world.

Dunno I just skimmed the paper but it seemed like it makes out the experience of seeing a colored object as this purely internal mental thing that doesn't change then makes you doubt your memories of it so you don't know if it's the same as yesterday.

But I mean who cares in terms of illusionism? I just look at the fucking orange sleeping bag and the theory is disproven.

[Anonymous No.22619134]

>>22619020
Hey anon - this is fellow eliminativism-hater anon who's been agreeing with you all thread. Just wondering - are you in phil professionally? I was considering it like a decade ago but backed out because being around so much smug, wilful stupidity like what we've been discussing in this thread was just too aggravating for me. If you are a prof, or in the prof pipeline, how do you handle it and why did you choose to continue on? Does it seem like a satisfying way of life to you? Just curious.

>>22619080
>capacity
heh yeah I was kinda sneaking around there but yeah of course you're right in pointing out that depending on whether you attribute any truth conduciveness to them you would either see it as a capacity in the fuller sense, or just "an action we can do".
>If it were true that all our thought so far relied on premises that relied on intuitions as premises, then this would be a problem to be solved
I think that's very obviously the case. You can't do any reasoning or even for coherent statements without assuming certain logical structures like identity and non-contradiction, and those logical structures can only have intuitions as their epistemic justification as we can't step outside of them to justify them and justification itself is a structure that can only be defined in terms of them. It's an obvious and fundamental problem that's been formulated in all sorts of ways since the ancient days and clearly can't be answered. This is why I don't really have a problem with analytics just going full in and saying "yeah ok we'll just agree intuitions work", because if you recognize the severity and universality of the problem just discussed, that's the only way forward. The other two possibilities are (1) "no intuitions don't work" in which case you can't do any reasoning as just discussed, and (2) "I won't have a position on whether intuitions work" in which case if you continue to do philosophy you're on just as shaky ground as the analytics just with less motivation to continue or pursue it at all.

Again, I take these problems entirely seriously and see the whole analytic project as unjustified because of them so I'm not arguing for reliance on intuition in the way they're using it, I just think they're the only ones treating the issue honestly, though stupidly.

[Anonymous No.22619152]

>>22619134
*even form coherent statements

[Anonymous No.22619156]

>>22619081
This guy is actually well respected in the effective altruist community - essentially pure autists who generally take a negative utilitarian moral stance towards the world and focus on long term reducing suffering (this generally entails destroying the natural world, antinatalism, etc) PLUS, for some unknown reason a weird autistic fixation on insects

>https://magnusvinding.com/2022/09/05/reasons-to-include-insects-in-animal-advocacy/

something abkut insects to these guys just sets off their autism antennae and the write long ass articles about insects and their suffering HAHAHAHHAH

[Anonymous No.22619170]

>>22619156
these people must be kept from institutions of power at all costs

[Anonymous No.22619172]

>>22619096
Because despite what these mechanistic retards with their smug reddit attitudes of "I'm so rational you're invoking magic! Everything has a rational logical explanation and only the deluded and the religious believe in anything non-physical" believe, the evidence against this reddontology is staring you directly in the face. Life IS magical, and there is nothing anyone can say or deny to prove otherwise. Feels good waking up and feeling the sunlight and smelling the coffee bros. God is good.

[Anonymous No.22619175]

>>22619170
There are a lot of them in tech sector and defense sector unfortunately, though predictably. Our only hope is that the new agers are right and at some point we reach a critical mass where pneumatics have their powers switched on to a greater degree and the world becomes more malleable to consciousness.

[Anonymous No.22619187]

>>22619175
I do like the slant of Toby Orb/MacAskill when it comes to altruism and preventing existential threats, but otherwise this seems to go off the deep end into nutty autism land.
>Our only hope is that the new agers are right and at some point we reach a critical mass where pneumatics have their powers switched on to a greater degree and the world becomes more malleable to consciousness.
God I hope this happens

[Anonymous No.22619208]

>>22619170
>https://reducing-suffering.org/invertebrate-suffering-worm-composting/

>Vermicomposting (composting using earthworms) is a popular eco-friendly method for disposing of home food scraps. Unfortunately, worm composting forces large numbers of invertebrate animals to be born without their consent into short lives that soon end with painful deaths. In addition, worm composting involves some inevitable direct harm to some of the worms and other critters inhabiting the compost bin. For these reasons, I oppose vermicomposting and suggest disposing of food waste in other ways that give rise to fewer invertebrates.

The great evil of the world - composting bins!

[Anonymous No.22619273]

>>22619020
>The point here is that when [Dennett and Frankish] try to separate [consciousness and phenomenal consciousness] they end up with a notion of consciousness that simply does not work, and has no bearing on reality.
They don't do that. I didn't do that. I thought I made it pretty explicit that anything that's given in experience is part of the explanandum.
>Ugh, this can be said about literally any conceivable position.
>Dennett and Frankish dumb, they obviously make no sense
Not an excuse to not make the effort. If an esteemed philosopher seems nonsensical to you, you can stroke your ego by putting him down or you can engage in some humility, accept that there's something to learn and learn it.
>I'll add that the defender of phenomenal consciousness does not need to argue for the transparence of qualia, but only for their presence.
Yeah, yeah. "Consciousness might be an ilusion, but you have yet to explain the ilusion". Often repeated response of those who don't get it and don't even try to get it. Oh, and you're thinking of qualia realists. Again, nobody denies the existence of phenomenal consciousness.

Regarding the arguments for the Hard Problem, you know that your beliefs about your qualia are just as unjustified as the same beliefs of your zombie twin? That's because they lack a causal connection with the physical world and therefore they cannot be affected by it. It's fine to think of qualia as ineffable, qualitative etc., but working through all the implications of this view is when things start to get messy. I've had the opposite experience with Chalmers. The more I read him, the less appealing his approach seemed. Where do beliefs about your qualia come from and how are they different from qualia-independent beliefs? Are beliefs about your percepts ("I'm staring at a screen right now") qualia-independent? If yes, what qualia-dependent beliefs remain if you take them out?

Think about questions like these hard and long enough (and that's just one line of questioning) and maybe you won't see my reference to beliefs as a non-starter anymore.

By the way, you might try reading what Chalmers had to say about eliminativism. He gets it and he also speaks your language. He doesn't accept the position of course, but he appreciates it for what it is very well. I think he said something about its "appeal" or "allure".

The Hard Problem guy does not think it incoherent or untenable, so take it from him if you don't believe me.

[Anonymous No.22619283]

>>22619273
>That's because they lack a causal connection with the physical world and therefore they cannot be affected by it.
Not the same anon but - that's why idealism.

[Anonymous No.22619355]

>>22619134
>If you are a prof, or in the prof pipeline, how do you handle it and why did you choose to continue on? Does it seem like a satisfying way of life to you?
Atm I am a 29yo non-tenured professor in continental Europe, I'll most likely get tenure either in a few years from now (I'm already on a sure track to it).
If I must be honest, I would have dropped academia had I been born in the US. Fortunately I was born in Europe, so I could keep up with the academic path by focusing on history of philosophy (I mostly deal with Greek and classicsl German philoslphy). Beware, to me it is just a ploy to get tenure, but at the very least I don't have to deal with costant idiocy in order to keep the charade up. I get to read insightful texts and get teaching opportunities and a steady wage; in the meanwhile I'll keep studying on my own and better myself on a philosophical level. I really think I could have not managed to pull it off in the US, considering how much nonsense you're required to deal with to be professionally respectable.
I must add, I don't think Americans are stupid, I just think that the professional requirements that are usually enforced in American universities (and in surrounding institutions) makes it very very hard to mantain philosophical dignity, to the point where it almost seems like it is better to either emigrate, or to pursue philosophy outside of academia. I resent it, since I'm seeing these trends taking hold on European academia too, and since I have met brilliant American and British philosophers who are being held down by the very limiting system of analytic philosophy.
>You [...] non-contradiction,
I don't want to delve too much into it, since I'm sure I would end up writing dozens of 3000 characters-long posts. I'll just say that even in Aristotle you can find justifications for principles such as the one of non-contradiction which do not rely on intuitions (see book Gamma of Metaphysics). There you can find a proof of that principle that is built on immanent critique: namely, a proof that starts with the opposite claim (for which the principle does not apply), and shows how such a principle could not even be formulated if it were true. The refutation of skepticism and relativism you can find in the same book should be enough to discourage you from similar objections of this sort.
But I would add: even if you do not find those arguments and their methodology convincing, my advice is to regard that as an issue to be solved, rather than something that is to be accepted. I really think that this is our task as philosophers. Otherwise we are just swindlers. And if we are just swindlers, then our task is to show people that that's the case: but to do it we would have to accept exactly those kinds of principles we are trying to deny. This guarantees us that there is a way to get out of this issues, and should motivate us into not giving up to the kind of intellectual laziness I mentioned earlier.

[Anonymous No.22619403]

>>22619273
>Not an excuse to not make the effort.
Who told you that I didn't? I even ended up speaking with both Dennet and Frankish, and holding correspondence with both of them.
>If an esteemed philosopher seems nonsensical to you, you can stroke your ego by putting him down or you can engage in some humility, accept that there's something to learn and learn it.
True, but it could also be the case that his respectability merely boils down to academic politics, and I really think this is the case. This is also why I don't judge negatively students and non-academics who entertain these ideas: not only it's their task to broaden their horizons, but it is also the case that they keep being told that these guys are supposedly intelligent. I say this because I really want to make it clear that I feel no negative sentiment towards you. I know I have said many times that I think these positions are stupid, but I also really don't want to imply that you're a stupid person for holding or respecting them.
>Often repeated response of those who don't get it and don't even try to get it. Oh, and you're thinking of qualia realists. Again, nobody denies the existence of phenomenal consciousness.
Then I suggest you to reread Illusionism as the Default yadda yadda.
>Regarding the arguments for the Hard Problem, you know that your beliefs about your qualia are just as unjustified as the same beliefs of your zombie twin?
From what I've said you should gather that I do not think that the zombie twin has any belief, since, as I have said, I think the zombie argument works for any kind of intentionality.
>I've had the opposite experience with Chalmers. The more I read him, the less appealing his approach seemed
I really don't think Chalmers is necessary, and I really dislike the fact that the hard problem of consciousness is so often associated with him. For example you can find already the general argument in Leibniz' Monadology, in the enlarged mill argument, and I really think that suffices (even without all the Monadology baggage).
>Where do beliefs about your qualia come from and how are they different from qualia-independent beliefs?
Where do beliefs come from, in the physicalist picture of the world? I think that's a better question, one that you should ponder on: I assure you that if you do you'll understand better where Im coming from.
>By the way, you might try reading what Chalmers had to say about eliminativism. He gets it and he also speaks your language. He doesn't accept the position of course, but he appreciates it for what it is very well. I think he said something about its "appeal" or "allure".
I have actually made this argument in a previous post, where I have said that the commitments that ground eliminativism are prima facie reasonable, once one wants to defend physicalism while knowing that reductive physicalism is bunk.

[Anonymous No.22619405]

>>22618860
Dennett is a compatibilist.

>>22619081
Dennett is actually autistic. Like, he has brain problems.

[Anonymous No.22619438]

>>22619403
>Where do beliefs about your qualia come from and how are they different from qualia-independent beliefs?
Where do beliefs come from, in the physicalist picture of the world? I think that's a better question, one that you should ponder on: I assure you that if you do you'll understand better where Im coming from.

I’m just reading the thread and not who you’re replying to, but can you answer that question without evading? Who cares which is more important, it’s an interesting question and if you’re incapable of answering it just say so and then maybe someone who can answer it will chime in.

[Anonymous No.22619446]

>>22619355
Interesting thanks anon.

On the axioms thing, I haven't read metaphysics in so long, but maybe I'll go look for the arguments you referenced though I'm sure they won't move me as I've been in this position for a decade and attacked it constantly to no avail.
>Otherwise we are just swindlers. And if we are just swindlers, then our task is to show people that that's the case
That's pretty much the conclusion I came to and part of the reason I dropped out. My only place would have been teaching phil from a skeptical point of view to undergrads who were there because of their inclination to believe in phil, not to learn to disbelieve it.

I actually think (completely ahistorically and with no justification other than my own imaginings which I fully admit are probably historically provably false but I don't care) that philosophy as embodied by Socrates and perverted by Plato and Aristotle was actually intended as a mystery school - a rite of passage - for this very reason. It's a process of exploring the allure of reason and eventually realizing its bounds and transcending it.

Where this has lead for me personally is towards art and mysticism. If you come to the conclusion that all the real substance of meaning is in the pre-linguistic / pre-logical or extra-linguistic / extra-logical, or however you want to frame it, then the jolly task becomes to learn to swim in that ocean. The ineffable may be ineffable but that doesn't mean it's inaccessible. In fact it's readily accessible and a joy to explore and learn about and experience. Reason is a tool for doing your taxes and deciding which soap to buy. Music, art, a hike in the woods - these things hold the philosopher's stone. I guess I'm something like a kind of taoist at this point if I had to name it.

[Anonymous No.22619487]

If you guys would stop just saying dennets claims are incredulous and stupid, and gave it a fair shot, it's not that ridiculous.

What these people who claim qualia are real, like ontologically real things, is essentially that the brain functions like an old fashioned chemical type photograph, where the red of the photo is literally some type of color pigment.

Dennet is saying no, the brain is more like a floppy disk and when it "takes a photo" what happens is physical substrate changes (eg neurons chemicals etc) in such a way as "red" is represented. There is no actual red.

And so yes he is denying we see red as of out visual experience contained actual red pigment, or smell "pigment", when in reality there is a brain state.

The only retort to this is... but it's obvious to me I see red? But, we don't have any introspective access to our brain states so what are we even saying? What is our privileged access? It just seems to you as if your visual field is of the "red pigment" variety when in reality there's just neuronal states. It's a illusion.

[Anonymous No.22619495]

>>22619487
>don't trust your phenomenal experience that you see red
>instead trust an entire arcane ontology of physical entities and byzantine theories built on that ontology which you can only interact with via phenomenal experiences of books written by midwits
You can beg the question from either side but one is obviously more ridiculous than the other.

[Anonymous No.22619497]

>>22617114
daniel dennett does not "den[y] phenomenal consciousness."

[Anonymous No.22619511]

>>22617153
"no reds no greens no sensations no nothing"
another thing that daniel dennett does not say.
it's more like this: the red you see is just red. as you learn more about redness, you learn more about the red you see. ditto for all sensations.

[Anonymous No.22619517]

>>22619495
if you trust your senses, why are their analyzed consequences "arcane?" if you don't trust your sense, why the hell do you want to trust your phenomenal experience?

[Anonymous No.22619520]

>>22619495
But that's how all our technology functions. Whatever computer you're on 4chan with is a physical system that represents its states with a user interface. When you put something in the recycle bin, there is no actual bin, there is a physical hard disk which gets programmed to write over previous physical voltage meters

And if you hit your brain hard enough you die. If you take drugs your conscious is altered

It's clear the world is physical. And if it's physical there can be no actual "red sensation" so what is there? Physical brain states that are internally represented as a belief in red phenomenal experiences.

Because the way I see it, if you think there really is qualia then you must dispose of materialism and either go idealist or dualist. But basically all our science takes as axiomatic materialism and it gets good results so it's logical to conclude it's getting at something true (especially considering the correlation between brain states and consciousness.

[Anonymous No.22619528]

>>22619170
>>22619175
Sam Bankman Fried was famously an Effective Altruist, all the other prominent FTX goons were as well.
I'm sure I don't need to tell you how it worked out. Searching for "Effective Altruism cult" will yield endless results.
https://youtube.com/watch?v=H5-AEGz2PJ0
(His supposed origin story of the japan arbitrage is bullshit too)

[Anonymous No.22619575]

I don't get it, if everything is an illusion in our head, what stops us from manipulating this into being whatever we want?
why can't I make my brain make it so that I'm feeling sensation of having Monica Belluci's tits in my mouth?

[Anonymous No.22619621]

>>22619517
You're failing to understand the depth of the retardation of the thesis. The question isn't "do your trust your perceptions" in the sense of "can I trust that the information they deliver is reliable" - it's "do you trust your perceptions" in the sense of "do you trust that they exist", not "do you trust that the things attested to by your perceptions exist" but "do you trust that your perceptions themselves exist", which possible the maximally retarded thing to deny, to such an extent that you can't really even formulate a coherent denial of it that doesn't contain inherent admissions that your perceptions themselves do exist.
>arcane
If you're engaged in trying to doubt "my perceptions are occurrent to me", then any level of reasoning as to the consequences of those perceptions, let alone the 10,000,000 step inference required to justify a theory based on neuroscience, qualifies as relatively arcane.

>>22619520
>muh results so it's true
go watch jordan peterson. really though, you should probably reread the thread. All of your concerns are addressed in massive detail and nuance many times over already.

[Anonymous No.22619623]

>>22619621
*which is possibly the maximally

[Anonymous No.22619626]

>>22619438
>I’m just reading the thread and not who you’re replying to, but can you answer that question without evading? Who cares which is more important, it’s an interesting question and if you’re incapable of answering it just say so and then maybe someone who can answer it will chime in.
I think I can only give you a partial answer, and if you want I will be able to substantiate it tomorrow (since it's 1am here and I'm really tired): the physicalist picture of the world cannot actually give any ground to the presence of ANY sort of intentionality (and this includes beliefs), and the reason for why is that so can be easily gathered from a reapplication of the hard problem from the issue of phenomenal consciousness to the issue of intentional contents.
I only give a partial answer (i e. I tell you that something cannot be grounded by physicalism, instead of saying how it can actually be grounded) because I believe anything more than that would require a whole full-fledged philosophical system.

[Anonymous No.22619638]

>>22619487
>in such a way as "red" is represented. There is no actual red.
How does this floppy disk represent anything? Could this body operate in the same way it did without representing anything?

[Anonymous No.22619647]

>>22619626
Well, maybe someone who knows more about it than us can chime in and help us get a better understanding.

[Anonymous No.22619651]

>>22619446
The main reason I disagree with your outlook is because I have already discovered that all forms of absolute skepticism presuppose exactly what they're trying to suppress. Once this point is grasped, it becomes clear that the task of philosophy CAN be successful. Wether it has been successful so far it's a whole different question.
Im going to bed now, I'm too tired. If you want to continue this discussion tomorrow you'll find me here

[Anonymous No.22619663]

>>22619647
I can substantiate it more tomorrow, but for now I'll just say that for the scope of this conversation what I have said is enough, since here the focus was eliminativism, and more in general physicalism. If eliminativism must refer to beliefs, must be a comprehensive picture of the world, and at the same time it is incapable of grounding them, then it is clear that eliminativism is self-contradictory, and not an adequate picture of reality. The question on how to ground beliefs is a different one, and would probably require a different thread.

[Anonymous No.22619730]

>>22619638
Dennets claim is precisely that - we represent nothing (substantially). There is just the physical substrate. Us thinking we see "red" (as a phenomenal quality) is like a floppy disk thinking it "sees" a picture when the file is opened.

[Anonymous No.22619757]

>>22619730
So in that analogy what does Dennet think fulfills the function of the monitor that displays the red and what fulfills the function of the observer of the monitor?

[Anonymous No.22619762]

>>22619757
Brains are not computers, they don't work like computers, there are substantial differences between brains and computers.

[Anonymous No.22619771]

>>22617060
I haven't read this thread yet but I've never seen a positive post about Dan Dennett on 4chan. No once. Every now and then you see people speaking positively of Christopher Hitchens/Richard Dawkins and even Sam Harris...but I have never seen anyone with anything good to say about Dennett.

[Anonymous No.22619779]

>>22619757
The analogy breaks down but he would see there just is no user interface. No "Cartesian theater" or lcd screen where it's represented. What happens is the physical substrate enters a representational state of there being a user interface, but this is non-phenomeal. It thinks one exists but it doesn't.

[Anonymous No.22619787]

>>22617265
That abstract reads like projection and ideology informed by 00s New Atheism bullshit.

[Anonymous No.22619791]

OP is literally just mad that not everyone believes in souls

[Anonymous No.22619793]

>>22619771
4channrs are contrarian edgelords who gravitate to extremes for the purposes of playing rhetorician which naturally makes them disgusted by middle-of-the-road compromisers like Dennett. Compatibilism as a whole has a very low reputation here for that reason, and by comparison a very high one on reddit for literally the opposite reason.

[Anonymous No.22619800]

>>22619793
Elaborate.

[Anonymous No.22619814]

>>22619800
Materialists believe that the material has ontological priority over other substances. In theories of the mind, this typically means that mental phenomena are caused by brains, specifically neurological activity (as opposed to dualists who believe that brains are not the source of mental phenomena). Eliminative materialists (such as the Churchlands) believe that our everyday language to describe mental phenomena has little to no basis in reality and does not accurately described observable phenomena: they wish to eliminate the language that we use to discuss mental phenomena and instead craft new language to discuss mental phenomena . Compatibilists are materialists who believe that our everyday language for describing mental phenomena does in fact accurately describe mental phenomena.

Daniel Dennett takes this view. It's a compromise position in that it agrees that mental phenomena is caused by neurological activity but doesn't go so far as to actually reify the existence of anything just because we can describe it (this is a common criticism of dualism).

For what it's worth, to some degree you just have to engage in compatibilism to even talk about this stuff. The Churchlands frequently fall prey to this in spite of their obnoxiously brazen rhetoric.

[Anonymous No.22619818]

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=ai0V6DjfKmM

30.54 for the next few minutes. I don't understand this. We have those functional behaviours because the pain HURTS!!

[Anonymous No.22619857]

>>22619793
Redditors regress to the mean because their platform has a voting system. 4chan might encourage more extreme positions for those chasing (You)s but generally those people are retarded and don't service detailed discussion.

[Anonymous No.22619858]

Epiphenomenalist sisters... now's our time to strike... our enemies are distracted.

[Anonymous No.22619860]

>>22617250
God, just get holocausted already

[Anonymous No.22619971]

>>22617060
Yeah and it ignores NDEs. But NDEs are actually solid proof of life after death, because anyone can have them if they come close to and survive death. And they are so extremely real to those who have them: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U00ibBGZp7o

As this NDEr described their NDE:

>"Now, what heaven looks like? 'OMG' doesn't even describe how beautiful this place is. Heaven is, there are no words. I mean, I could sit here and just not say anything and just cry, and that would be what heaven looks like. There are mountains of beauty, there are things in this realm, you can't even describe how beautiful this place is. There are colors you can't even imagine, there are sounds you can't even create. There are beauties upon this world that you think are beautiful here. Amplify it over there times a billion. There are, it's incredibly beautiful, there's no words to describe how beautiful this place is, it's incredibly gorgeous."

And importantly, even dogmatic skeptics have this reaction, because the NDE convinces everyone:
https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/mysteries-consciousness/202204/does-afterlife-obviously-exist

So anyone would be convinced if they had an NDE, we already know this, no one's skepticism is unique.

>muh brain chemistry

Neuroscientists are convinced by NDEs too. What do skeptics think they understand that neuroscientists do not?

>muh DMT causes it

Scientifically refuted already, and NDErs who have done DMT too say that the DMT experience, while alien and really cool and fun, was still underwhelming to the point of being a joke when compared to the NDE.

[Anonymous No.22619979]

Everytime i read something by dennet I am utterly confused by what he is actually saying, and then when I finally get it, I realize he is literally claiming we have no phenomenal experiences. But this is directly refuted by me just looking at something. Then I read more and other people say no he isn't claiming that then I get more confused

It really seems like that's what he's saying. That we just have beliefs about things and some of those beliefs are things like "the apple is red and crispy and tastes sweet", and there is no sensations to these things beyond these beliefs.

But that's, retarded? I'm actually so confused.

[Anonymous No.22619991]

>>22619979
>I realize he is literally claiming we have no phenomenal experiences
Daniel Dennett doesn't believe this.

>But that's, retarded?
He believes that every second the brain is constantly doing a bunch of processing and writing the results to memory. The next second the brain reads the memory, and does more processing, then stitches these results onto the last second's. "Consciousness" is taking several of these snapshot-iterations and extending them over time. He's actually autistic so he says all of this in the most absolutely retarded ways possible.

Go read his books if you actually want to know what he thinks.

[Anonymous No.22620006]

>>22619979
Take this pic for example. He seems to be seeing seeing an apple = real physical apple sends light waves to photons that the brain processes and the result is a belief that there's a red apple. And there's no sensation of seeing or phenomenal quality of how the red looks. But thats.. retarded? I mean that just completely bypasses what seeing is- the visual sensations, how something looks. It's like he thinks we're belief producing robots or something. But this is directly refuted by just opening you eyes?

I am just so utterly confused. It's as if to say if you took lsd and the apple is morphing around going crazy, there is not hallucination either, just a belief there is?

But isn't the theory that the brain produces your sensations and why you hallucinate is the chemicals mess up your normal mode of brain function so the sensations it makes are all fucked up?

He seems to be saying there are no sensations at all, just states of belief (what does this even mean?) in apples and apples that are morphing around?

[Anonymous No.22620011]

>>22619991
Yes I read consciousness explained and this is multiple drafts theory and his explicit point is that there is no "Final copy" thay gets presented in consciousness (or a Cartesian theater), because that literally doesn't exist. The brain just processes incoming data in all manner of ways in different areas and times and outputs behaviour. There is no need for it to make this "inner representation world" to produce the behaviour.

But, it does? I mean how can you deny it?

[Anonymous No.22620012]

>>22617060
Assuming physicalism is true, everything becomes contingent, such that everything is just as likely to produce true results as false ones. It’d be stupid if the truth of physicalism itself is somehow an exception to this, which Dennett seems to think.

[Anonymous No.22620125]

>>22619028
His rationale for focusing on suffering is basically that his feelings tell him to, and all value us ultimately arbitrary and based on feelings.

https://reducing-suffering.org/is-my-suffering-focus-a-bias/

>My "sheer intensity" intuition for SFE plausibly does come from the contingent fact that my emotional reaction to extreme suffering is so strong while my emotional reaction to hypothetical extreme happiness is relatively weak. The horror I feel when contemplating torture has been "burned in" to my motivational system at a deep level, while notions of superhappiness feel abstract. Even if I imagine specific pleasurable experiences I've had, they don't hold a candle to the awfulness of torture, and it's difficult to conceive of pleasures vastly more intense than those I've experienced. If my brain were wired differently such that it could experience extreme pleasures, I might feel a "sheer intensity" intuition about the immense importance of creating superhappiness, not just preventing extreme suffering.

>So if my brain had been wired differently, I would have different moral values. But so what? If my brain had been wired to morally care about creating paperclips, I would want to create paperclips. If my brain had been wired to morally value causing suffering, I would want to cause suffering. And so on. The contingent circumstances that led to my current values are what made me me rather than someone else.

>That humans value happiness and suffering is also a contingent fact based on evolution. If evolution had created organisms whose behavior was driven in other ways, I probably wouldn't care much about happiness or suffering; they would both seem like abstract, unfamiliar concepts.

[Anonymous No.22620132]

>>22617114
Ok, I get it. But, like, clam down.

[Anonymous No.22620157]

>>22620006
What observable behaviors result from sensations?

[Anonymous No.22620182]

>>22620157
What is observation without sensation?

[Anonymous No.22620186]

>>22620182
so sensations aren't a product of living organisms, they're just a product of everything

[Anonymous No.22620305]

>>22619621
dennett doesn't think that sensory information comes from nothing, he thinks it comes from your sense organs.

[Anonymous No.22620310]

>>22619730
>nothing
>there is
??

[Anonymous No.22620317]

>>22619762
brains don't compute, they don't work like computers, there are substantial differences between thinking and computing

[Anonymous No.22620637]

>>22617060
Dennett's determinism bores me as obviously false. On the other hand his sense of the incalculable aspect of human sense is utterly compelling. Naturally I prefer the latter.

[Anonymous No.22621380]

>>22617060
I still haven't read this, but all arguments against physicalism seem like trolls playing devil's advocate, so I haven't felt the need to read it yet. After modern biology and the discovery of genetics, physicalism is self-evident, while metaphysics is outdated.

[Anonymous No.22621453]

>>22621380
>I still haven't read this, but
I don't know what I'm talking about, but

[Anonymous No.22621469]

>>22620305
How do we know those organs are even use for sense without prior knowledge?

[Anonymous No.22621483]

>>22621453
I don't see why I need to read this book to know what I'm talking about when I've read other (and in my view, more important) books on the topic. As far as metaphysics is concerned, it's been put to rest in philosophy since Nietzsche, and consequently in the sciences as well. Do you have even an inkling of a clue as to how complex our genome and nervous system work, how intricately nutrition plays a role in gene expression across generations, and how in-depth these influence sensory processing? Further, do you grasp at all what evolution means for organisms and their minds? Dennett has always seemed like a Dawkins or Harris type to me — someone in the age of capitalism regurgitating what real geniuses already settled just to make a few bucks.

[Anonymous No.22621498]

>>22621483
>As far as metaphysics is concerned, it's been put to rest in philosophy since Nietzsche, and consequently in the sciences as well

Someone unironically typed this.

[Anonymous No.22621520]

>>22621498
You haven't read enough philosophy, or you just don't understand what you read. The continentals, particularly the existentialists, utterly destroyed metaphysics, for all time.

[Anonymous No.22621634]

>>22619403
>Who told you that I didn't?
Not who, what. Your repeated insistence that Dennett and Frankish deny the existence of phenomenal consciousness, which is blatantly wrong and demonstrable with direct citations. You can't reconcile that fact with your flawed understanding of their positions, so you deny it instead of digging deeper.

I can point things out to you all day, but ultimately you need to, sorry to say, take your head out of your ass and think harder.

Your comment on Leibniz's argument is additional evidence that you're not very well read in philosophy of mind. Pretty much nobody with a clue is satisfied with it. You can consult Dennet's book on thought experiments, if you care to find out one reason why. If you can get over yourself and admit that Dennet might have something to teach you.

[Anonymous No.22621665]

>>22621483
>>22621520
>still can't explain what properties/laws of energy make it capable of "generating" consciousness in the first place
Nietzsche was a turbo faggot and so is everyone who has been brainwashed by materialism

[Anonymous No.22621670]

>>22621665
>needs explaining what his intuition should be able to grasp
Sorry, but you're an autist, just like Plato, Aristotle, and all the people they indoctrinated.

[Anonymous No.22621687]

>>22621670
>still hasn't provided an explanation based on the fundamental laws of physics of how consciousness works
>bro, the brain and genetics is like, super complex, and it just arises, ok???
There is nothing "intuitive" about this, you simply used that as a cop-out on a nobel prize-tier problem. Don't respond till you can explain what it is about energy that enables it to be "generate" consciousness. Once you do I'll give you your nobel.

[Anonymous No.22621711]

>>22621634
>Not who, what. Your repeated insistence that Dennett and Frankish deny the existence of phenomenal consciousness, which is blatantly wrong and demonstrable with direct citations
Show me these citations then. Or don't, I honestly don't really care, since I have heard what they actually think on the matter from the man himself (in private he tends to be less diplomatic).
>You can't reconcile that fact with your flawed understanding of their positions, so you deny it instead of digging deeper.
Again, you can say this about literally every position that is wrong.
>Your comment on Leibniz's argument is additional evidence that you're not very well read in philosophy of mind. Pretty much nobody with a clue is satisfied with it
I have a clue and I am satisfied by it. I'm sure you will understand why I am simply left indifferent by your appeal to consensus in analytic philosophy. Maybe you could substantiate your objection to the mill argument instead, in your own words, that would be more fruitful.
>You can consult Dennet's book on thought experiments, if you care to find out one reason why. If you can get over yourself and admit that Dennet might have something to teach you.
Im done with Dennett. I have read all his works, and I have talked extensively with the guy. I am more interested in talking with those who still follow him, as long as they express their thoughts in their own words.
So please, let's ignore Dennett, and instead tell me your own position on this matter. I am sure it will be a much more fruitful discussion (and a much more enjoyable one, I don't think there would be anything more boring to me than going through a text by Dennett, or to mull for hundreds of posts under his rhetorical tricks)

[Anonymous No.22621718]

>>22619730
Ok let me rephrase the question: how does the brain represent, in general?

[Anonymous No.22622107]

I just watched a video with frankish and he showed an illusion where you look at an inverted flag, then a white screen and you see an American flag. dennet used this as well.

The argument seems to be, because there is no external referent to the red you see, it's just an belief in your mind that you're "seeing red", and so theres no need to posit phenomenal red beyond the mere belief you're seeing phenomal red. And I guess they just extend this to all phenomenal experiences? From the scientific view of the world our naive realism is wrong so even though when we see a real American flag, the red is just an artifact of our perceptual system and if in the case of the illusion American flag our "red quale" is just a belief in a red quale (i.e. there is no Cartesian theater in the mind where the red is "presented" in consciousness) then it's just the same for our normal sensory perceptions?

Tell me if I'm getting this right. I'm either retarded or they're extremely unclear what they're actually saying. I wish they would just spell it out with examples etc.

If true, firstly this is just retarded because obviously there is phenomenal red i can see it in both cases of illusion flag and real flag and its clearly not a belief I don't understand how anyone can think this? Or what's even the motivation for thinking this? It seems like they're are so committed to science that they can't cope with the fact when you open someone's head you don't observe their inner experience but see a brain, so the person's feelings and perceptions are just denied to exist? Wtf?

Also what is an intentional object

[Anonymous No.22623191]

>>22621469
What the hell does "the sense organs are used for sense" even mean? Do you mean to say that sensations are represented in the sense organs? I know that rationally.

[Anonymous No.22623206]

God I just watched another frankish lecture and I have to say this guy just seems like an actual idiot. Plus he speaks so slow and choppily even on 2x speed it's boring to follow.

His argument is basically you don't have privileged epsitemic access to your mental states. Mental states require mechanism. Mechanism is the domain of science. Science shows no room for phenomenal experiences. Therefore they don't exist. You believe they do, but they don't.

How the fuck can someone make a career out of such a dumbest idea?

[Anonymous No.22623269]

>There are retards ITT who have read Illusionism as the Obvious Default Theory of Consciousness and interpret it as the denial of the existence of consciousness
It continues to amaze me how unskilled in reading anons can be.

It's 8 pages long and it's not that difficult. It relies on a sketchy metaphor to get its point across and it makes some unexplained references to external ideas, but you can easily overcome it if you're not a hopeless dumbass.

>>22622107
It's actually discussed there. Don't be like this retard >>22617293 though and have the mental capacity to relate what's being said to the preceding discussion (the one about representation).

[Anonymous No.22623294]

>>22623269
Lying, trolling or hopelessly retarded.

[Anonymous No.22623359]

>>22620011
>But, it does?
The brain can take its own actions as inputs, duh. Go read Plato's Camera if you want to see a physicalist come up with deep and complex structures that are "just neurons". He even reinvents the Theory of the Forms.

[Anonymous No.22623464]

>>22623269
I am amazed you can't even reach the end of an 8 page paper where it is clearly stated what is being claimed - consciousness lacks phenomenal properties. We are unconscious brains that report beliefs in consciousness because our neural mechanism unconsciously represents things. There is no phenomenality

But obviously, to anyone who isn't brain damaged and mindfucked by phyaicalism, this is directly refuted by simply opening your eyes...

[Anonymous No.22623498]

>>22623464
>phenomenality
Define this.

[Anonymous No.22623501]

>>22623498
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phenomenalism
>In metaphysics, phenomenalism is the view that physical objects cannot justifiably be said to exist in themselves, but only as perceptual phenomena or sensory stimuli (e.g. redness, hardness, softness, sweetness, etc.) situated in time and in space.

[Anonymous No.22623506]

>>22623464
>physical action isn't all there is
>this can be easily proven by performing a physical action

[Anonymous No.22623511]

>>22617060
>>22617114
>makes a thread to call something stupid
>can't actually articulate an argument to refute it
>didn't even read the book
Many such cases

[Anonymous No.22623512]

>>22623501
So then the problem isn't that Dennett "doesn't believe in consciousness" (because he literally does), it's that he believes that we can actually gain knowledge about reality, he just happens to be routing it through a form of atomistic monism.

[Anonymous No.22623514]

>>22623294
>That second paragraph.
People... take this guy seriously?

[Anonymous No.22623521]

>>22623514
I mean, he has a point. Dualists can't even solve the vertiginous question and they're trying to argue that nobody is conscious and we're all just robots being piloted from afar and aren't experiencing anything.

[Anonymous No.22623541]

>>22623511
The refutation: open your eyes

[Anonymous No.22623550]

>>22623521
idk all of this is over my materialist head
>See something
>Brain does things
>For reasons unknown I take notice of thing or not
>Might even get neuron activation if it's a woman's midriff

[Anonymous No.22623561]

>>22623514
Yes he's held up as one of the greatest philosophers of mind in history.

His theory is quite literally, phenomenal states feel like nothing, we are just physical brain systems that believe our physical representative states (in the same way a cd physically "represents" physical sound waves with grooves) have phenomenal properties.

His science of consciousness is to treat reports of phenomenal states "I am in pain" as not representing any actual sensation, but of the behavioral expression of an internal system representing, unconsciously, bodily damage.

Hence, illusionism. We just think we are conscious but we aren't. So physicalism prevails and all the issues with it like Mary's room, hard problem, p-zombies etc dissolve. Mary learns nothing because there is sinply nothing it is like, phenomenally, to see red. There is no hard problem because there is no phenomenal aspect to the physical world, nothing to explain. And we are in a sense p-zombies. People have an "inner life" but it is similar to a computer processing inputs and outputting behaviours and making reports.

>inb4 that one tard says I'm misunderstanding dennett and gives no explanation because he can't accept his daddy philosopher is THAT retarded

[Anonymous No.22623570]

>>22623561
And then of course like that paragraph he treats anyone saying this is fucking retarded with a smug, pompous attitude of "heh.. idiots believing in magic..."

[Anonymous No.22623586]

>>22623521
>Dualists can't even solve the vertiginous question
wrong

[Anonymous No.22623608]

>>22623561
>Mary learns nothing because there is sinply nothing it is like, phenomenally, to see red. There is no hard problem because there is no phenomenal aspect to the physical world, nothing to explain. And we are in a sense p-zombies. People have an "inner life" but it is similar to a computer processing inputs and outputting behaviours and making reports.
That's all correct though.

If you suggest that there is something missing, then what prevents me from adding any number of arbitrary extra qualities that cannot be detected, and insist that they must be taken seriously?

[Anonymous No.22623632]

>>22623608
My response to this is to either suggest you need therapy, or to yawn at your inane sophistry. It's just simply not worth engaging with such a silly claim.

[Anonymous No.22623635]

>>22623541
Non sequiter

[Anonymous No.22623643]

>>22623608
*kicks you in the balls*

That feeling is whats missing.

[Anonymous No.22623644]

>>22623632
>the method used to refute Pascal's Wager is sophistry
Agree with me or you will burn for eternity in hell. (You have no way of knowing whether or not I'm the real God.)

[Anonymous No.22623661]

>>22623644
You know what's even more parsimonious? Just denying everything entirely. Why stop at consciousness? Just deny physical reality as well. De y everything. Nothing exists. Why posit any entities at all?

Obviously because not doing so is retarded, stupid, and self refuting. And it is just so with consciousness.

I can't believe I'm even responding to someone who denies he can see my posts LOL my nigga you are batshit retarded

[Anonymous No.22623674]

>>22623661
Denying consciousness doesn't require consciousness. The behavior of expressing denial towards something that is given no evidence or description, is a purely physical process.

[Anonymous No.22623677]

Relevant

[Anonymous No.22623683]

>>22619497
I found the passages Galen Strawson gives from Dennett in this paper compelling evidence to the contrary:
https://www.academia.edu/37649217/Dunking_Dennett

An example:
Dennett:
>So let me confirm Jackson's surmise that I am his behaviorist; I unhesitatingly endorse the claim that "necessarily, if two organisms are behaviorally exactly alike, they are psychologically exactly alike."
The Message is: there is no Medium
https://sci-hub.ru/10.2307/2108264

[Anonymous No.22623685]

Relevant pic

[Anonymous No.22623746]

>>22623608
>That's all correct though.

[Anonymous No.22623751]

>>22623746
Not an argument.

[Anonymous No.22623782]

People take this guy seriously? We are all p-zombies? Resorting to some jew baiting in making the point as well?

What a fuckin retard LOL

[Anonymous No.22623810]

>>22623608
Do you feel things? Do you have experiences? Yes or no. That's the entire question. It's crazy to see how deep into a delusion a midwit can drive themself just because they were given a few fancy words to play with.

[Anonymous No.22623827]

>>22623608
OK then it's fine to stab and beat you and poke your eyes out and cut your cock off right? You're just a mechanism with no inner feelings

Fuckin tard you're either neurologically fucked up or you're trolling

[Anonymous No.22623832]

>>22623810
Yes. (This response was a physical process.)

>It's crazy to see how deep into a delusion a midwit can drive themself just because they were given a few fancy words to play with.
Literally how are you this dense and lacking in self awareness. Your beliefs are the ones that create a bunch of terms and try to force relevance on them without any compelling arguments for it. You invent problems where none exist. You ask questions, then claim people "don't get it" when they provide ANY answer. You have not grown passed the mind of a teenager who thinks other people misunderstanding you means they are stupid and not that you are bad at communicating.

>>22623827
>feelings don't exist so therefore consequences don't exist either
you too

[Anonymous No.22623839]

>>22623832
>I have experiences
>gaaah what? what is all that jargon what do you even mean jesus I can't even understand you?? Do you mean that there was a potential exchange at a chemical gate in your supersecularanulumreticulum with a p-e-chiral zone variation? SPEAK ENGLISH FUCK.
but no, I'm the one with an arcane ontology and a lack of self awareness.

[Anonymous No.22623856]

>>22623839
>language must always be literal and precise with no shortcutting

[Anonymous No.22623878]

>>22623856
>Your beliefs are the ones that create a bunch of TERMS
>buhhhh like nuh uh like uhh nooo! like uhhhh uhhh I didn't mean words I meant entities oh wait like uhhhh fuck I guess I'll just greentext

[Anonymous No.22623917]

I propose we round up the Mrs churchland and Daniel dennet and Keith frankish, and we deliver them to a breeding facility where Mrs churchland will be bred and fucked day in day out by the fat bastard illusionists until she's knocked the fuck up. Once she delivers her little mechanistic offspring we will sequester it (as cheaply as possible - there are zero welfare concerns) until Mrs churchland has been thoroughly fucked and bred again. Soon we will have a small robotic army of mineliminativists, and we shall take our business proposal public - ethical meat for vegans!

With investment we shall set up a factory farming facility whereby we shall produce, at extremely low cost a great number of p-zombie infants, each with flesh more succulent than the last. I imagining a great shed, with the descendants of our original "breeding stock" (the great great great grandchildren of the original dennet and churchlands - long since outlived their economic value as sold as vegan petfood) housed tighter and more efficiently than the worst abuses of a Chinese piggery, pumping out vast quantities of ethical flesh, blood, bone and organs.

Who is with me? We will make a fucking fortune.

[Anonymous No.22623929]

>>22623917
Implying that p zombies can be distinguished from other people is a contradiction.

[Anonymous No.22623993]

>>22623683
so you started with this sentence:
"psychological identity entails behavioral identity"
and you ended up with this sentence:
"psyches do not exist"
that's out and out illogical.

[Anonymous No.22624112]

>>22623917
She's a weird one. She HATES Chalmers and is a raging hagloid. On twatter, she occasionally comes back from the dead to leaves rude comments to Goff and Chalmers. She even mocked some poor rando because he also has the name 'David Chalmers,' so I guess she searches his name just to leave rude comments.

[Anonymous No.22624120]

>>22624112
I tried to watch this
>https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=6IVBxmaaGNg&t=1053s&pp=ygUUcGF0cmljaWEgY2h1cmNobGFuZCA%3D

Podcast and literally had to turn it off she comes off as such a smug entitled rude cunt lol it was insufferable

[Anonymous No.22624139]

>>22621687
"Consciousness" is a vacuous concept within genetics-based evolution and the neurophysiological complex. There are emergent states of perception that are in flux since the perceiver is in flux. "Consciousness" is nothing besides a label, a word, for an agreed-upon "higher" (read: herd) state of perception. Strip away your language, and what are you referring to? A bunch of bullshit, a meaningless word, an antiquated fragment of perception that outlasted its usefulness.

[Anonymous No.22624195]

>>22623993
>"psychological identity entails behavioral identity"

Actually no. He doesn't say this, and, regardless of Dennett's views anyway, I see no reason why a given physiological being in an identical state implies a *completely* identical physical state, as surely there are many different specific configurations of atoms and whatnot that would result in the same psychological outcome, even if every given physical configuration must generate the same psychology.

[Anonymous No.22624253]

>>22617251

Uhhh isn't that just basically idealism?
>there is a shared world
>we can never truly know this world
>all we have is a mental representation of it

???

[Anonymous No.22624282]

>>22623674
>Denying consciousness doesn't require consciousness

It *does* though, that's the thing. You need *someone* to interpret something as a denial of consciousness, as being not 'what they clearly are', otherwise the idea means nothing, as an unconscious robot would have to present something interpretative as a refutation of consciousness to a consciousness, otherwise no understanding is being ultimately acknowledged by anything.

[Anonymous No.22624285]

>>22624253
It's the complete opposite of idealism. The illusionists say there exists nothing ideal. As in for them "mental representations" are non-phenomenal physical brain states. When you see something, there is "nothing it is like" to see at all, you merely make a behavioral report about a physical brain state. The idea that seeing is like anything is false, and to think there is, is an illusion.

Yes, it's that retarded.

[Anonymous No.22624291]

>>22623832
>feelings don't exist so therefore consequences don't exist either
This is such a bizarre response. Like, clearly, consequences only matter *because* people have feelings that are affected, right? Otherwise why would you care about consequences at all? Can you explain you view on this?

[Anonymous No.22624294]

>>22618860

Serial killer in the making. What a freak. These ARE p-zombies.

[Anonymous No.22624298]

>>22624282
Why do you think "acknowledged" is a quality that substances cannot acquire through purely physical processes? Things interact and they become correlated, and the information from that event remains in existence in some form forever as a change in entropy.

[Anonymous No.22624312]

>>22624291
"caring" is just a state of something that is primed to react in certain ways to certain stimulus. It does not require anything mystical to happen.

[Anonymous No.22624333]

>>22624294
What's even more ridiculous is this guy is held up as some sort of authority figure in affective altruism. His works are constantly cited if you read around the effective altruist forums and generally in any negative utilitarian philosophies

Yes, thay guy! We should surely take moral prescriptions from a autistic serial killer who squashes bugs on the internet and thinks worm farming is a great moral affront.

[Anonymous No.22624341]

>>22624312
Be honest are you just typing this shit to troll or do you genuinely deny your own experiences? This kind of stuff is funny to me because there's only two options - you're just bored idiot, or you're actually retarded. Like there's no desirable explanation here lol

///////

If anyone wants to read an absolutely based essay BTFOing all these illusionist types read Galen Strawsons "100 years of consciousness a long training in absurdity". Especially the index where he specifically owns the fuck out Daniel faggot.

[Anonymous No.22624348]

>>22624285

So it's basically the bizarro twin of solipsism? Except that rather than "only I am real," it says "only not-I is real"?

Nothing I experience is actually real as a "me," it's all just pre-programmed code running, essentially?

[Anonymous No.22624358]

>>22624348
It's literally that conscious experience doesn't exist at all. Reality is just physics. You think you're conscious, but you're not.

[Anonymous No.22624367]

>>22624341
Why does "things can be explained" need to be a troll stance?

[Anonymous No.22624382]

>>22624358

Right, so like the inverse of solipsism. And just as retarded.

[Anonymous No.22624423]

>>22618765
will reading turn me into a eliminative materialist?

[Anonymous No.22624511]

>>22624195
he does say this. he says something even stronger, he says that behavior is psyche. why exactly do you think that the physical differences in us don't determine our psychic differences?

[Anonymous No.22624688]

>>22624358
>Reality is just physics. You think you're conscious, but you're not.
As someone who thinks reality is just physics (and biology/chemistry etc) this really confuses me.
I think therefore I am. Even if am is particles & energy it just so happens that a certain quality is me and a certain quality is anyone else in this thread. The specialness of why and how we consider certain experiences and what we build from those isn't lessened by this

[Anonymous No.22624800]

>>22624688
>http://www.scielo.org.co/scielo.php?script=sci_arttext&pid=S0121-36282019000100009

This article explains it. Essentially they have a physicalist metaphysics that, for some unknown reason excludes any experiential aspect at all (even emergence), despite their direct evidence in their experience that material reality DOES produce consciousness, and so must conclude that experience simply doesn't exist. Because their retarded metaphysics can't account for it.

The logic is literally this

>I see a red flower
>but my belief is the world metaphysically lacks any sort of experiential states
>therefore I don't see a red flower

I'm not exaggerating or strawmanning at all btw. These people literally think humans are philosophical zombies.

[Anonymous No.22624840]

>>22624511
>why exactly do you think that the physical differences in us don't determine our psychic differences?

I specifically said I *do* think this, but it's the other way around that isn't the case i.e. a given psychic state may correspond to a specific kind of structure that may be realizable by many different physical configurations.

[Anonymous No.22625224]

>>22624840
well if our behavioral states determine our psychic states, it's really not relevant whether or not several behavioral states may correspond to a single psychic state. the only consequence from this would be that psychic-representation is/isn't an injective relationship.

[Anonymous No.22625587]

>>22617114
youtube commentors are about as stupid as the stupidest people on 4chan

[Anonymous No.22625609]

>>22617251
Sure I can agree with this but this also doesn't touch at all on the problem of qualia and experience of these said metaphorical abstract items

[Anonymous No.22625709]

>>22623464
Surely he can't be saying that because there are optical illusions and such that makes us believe in it's origin as true (corresponding to the conception we have) even though it's caused by something else and therefore somehow now experience doesn't exist

[Anonymous No.22625719]

>>22623608
>>Mary learns nothing because there is simply nothing it is like, phenomenally, to see red
This is obviously not true. You can be as reductionist about the origins of the source of red but it will never get rid of the experience of red

[Anonymous No.22625722]

>>22624139
Congratulations, you've thrown out a string of word salad, saying nothing in the process! On top of that, you didn't even mention energy once, despite my challenge to you! Absolute garbage, this is why physicalists aren't taken serious, you point towards your "genetic-based evolution" and "neurophysiological complexes" and "flux" in the most vague manner to explain away even the most fundamental reductionary issues, like what are fundamental, ontological laws of energy that give it the emergent property of higher order consciousness? You can't even answers this, and consequently you go for some post-modern linguistic slop to explain it away without actually saying anything.

[Anonymous No.22625754]

I love consciousness because it makes empiricists wiggle and writhe in pain as their dear starting point of "only sensory experience verified is worth exploring" with their reductionist methods cannot account for the one and only truth of this world (I experience therefore I am). I wish nothing more that the origins of consciousness are forever unexplained to make the redditor seethe. Experiencing feels good bros

[Anonymous No.22625917]

>>22625722
>bitching about "word salads" when he uses faggot new age terms like "energy"
lol, this is an advanced troll

>higher order consciousness
There is no such thing outside of language. Evolution, genetics, biology, does not recognize such a thing, does not function with such a thing. You've strung together words that refer to nothing.

[Anonymous No.22626045]

>>22625917
>energy is new age
are atom bombs new age you stupid faggot? atoms are literally bounded by ungodly amounts of energy, and when you crack them, they melt your retarded brain and body and irradiate everything else. our "physical" world can be broke down into matter and energy, and quantum mechanics breaks the former down into the latter
>There is no such thing outside of language. Evolution, genetics, biology, does not recognize such a thing, does not function with such a thing. You've strung together words that refer to nothing.
even more faggotry. have you never even remotely had an epiphany or deep, soul touching insight about yourself? how about mediated on your own self awareness of your awareness? you are almost certainly just a NPC given your word vomit, just like dennett the autist. stop it with the post modern retardation

[Anonymous No.22626064]

>>22626045
There is no "higher." Again, evolution, genetics, biology, do not recognize or function from such a concept. Understanding this, all of you faggots defending "consciousness" or "soul" clearly have nothing and are defending an antiquated view that no longer holds any meaningful content.

[Anonymous No.22626083]

>>22626064
Vaguely hand-waving away to genetics, evolution, and biology with a post-modern slant is not an argument, especially when I am repeatedly pressuring your to deal with how energy (which entirely underpins your genetics, evolution, and biology), in terms of physics leads to higher order consciousness like what humans have evolved, capable of advance abstract thought, meditation, psychedelic experiences, and religious epiphanies. So far, you are completely incapable of grasping and dealing with this. And so say evolution doesn't "recognize or function from such a concept" is retarded itself, higher order thought alone heavily impacts ones chances of survival and propagation of genes. How do you think we got here in the first place?

The fact you continually ignore the problem of energy, and even had the gall to make it out to be a new age problem, reeks of /sci/-tier undergrad pseudery. Just admit you are out your depth.

[Anonymous No.22626153]

>>22626083
I don't need an argument. Nietzsche and modern science have already settled the matter and provide all the arguments for me. It's not my problem that you don't / can't read.

"Higher order" is a completely bogus notion. This is simply one perspective, one organism, attempting to tyrannize all others.

Evolution does not operate within a higher-lower dichotomy. It does not move up or down. Species do not become better or worse over time; they merely change. Why? Because there is no common, objective goal to life.

>but what about reproduction? isn't that the goal?
It is the goal of certain organisms living inside you, but not of all organisms inside you, or necessarily of you yourself, the "meta-organism" so to speak (a term that does not imply a higher-lower dichotomy, but a wider-thinner dichotomy), so it is not the common, objective goal to life.

>wtf is a wider-thinner dichotomy and why is it different from higher-lower?
You "consciousness" and "soul" retards love to project your tyrannical impulses into things and order things into a vertical hierarchy as a result. Take away that impulse, which is fueled by repression and fear, and you're left with the serene, loving perspective of the intellectual and the artist, the non-repressed organism, who sees only sets (set theory) of things, aside one another along a horizontal spectrum, rather than a vertical hierarchy. This is what wider-thinner denotes, it refers to horizontally positioned sets of things, and it's where ideas like Heraclitean flux, Nietzschean will to power, and Darwinian evolution stem and operate from, and these ideas are in alignment with how biology verifiably and observably works.

[Anonymous No.22626781]

>>22625719
The anon in question's model can handle experience just fine. That's the whole point of dualism, getting upset at the idea that you can reliably gain information about the world around you. You can call it "input-output processing like a really complex computer" (which isn't apt because computers pass everything through a CPU and a harddrive and brains lack an analogue for either) or whatever you want. All that Mary gains is mental phenomena of seeing the red object and a memory of the first time that she saw red, but she did in fact see red. She wouldn't see the red if she couldn't.

[Anonymous No.22626788]

>>22626781
>All that Mary gains is mental phenomena of seeing the red object and a memory of the first time that she saw red, but she did in fact see red. She wouldn't see the red if she couldn't.
But how can you be sure that my red is your red?

[Anonymous No.22626795]

The funniest part is Dennet is held up by pop culture and philosophers alike as one of the greatest philosophers of mind in history.

His central thesis? Consciousness doesn't exist.

Thats how you know its clown world.

[Anonymous No.22626802]

>>22626795
Can't define consciousness just like how you can't point to the soul.

[Anonymous No.22626804]

>>22626788
By comparing colors. We just present a bunch of objects (or swatches of colored paper) to both parties and ask them to organize them from red to violet. If the participants' swatches match, then they can see the same colors. If the order is different, then they don't. This does allow for the possibility that the participants' have their phenomenological experiences totally reversed when it comes to color, however.

But we can tell that this doesn't happen because color vision and processing are well understood, so we can literally just look at the two brains and eyes and confirm that we do in fact see the same colors.

[Anonymous No.22626806]

>>22626788
What if all adult males actually perceived grown women as little girls, like how you see little girls. And the old hags your qualia shows as adult women are just unknown to them - they would appear as grotesque monsters.

Would that make adult men pedophiles? Because they're attracted to what to you, would seem to be little girls. But to them are adult women.

How can you even disprove this?

[Anonymous No.22626807]

>>22626795
>Consciousness doesn't exist.
An anon posted the 8-page paper where he outlines his thesis and says that consciousness is a thing, anon.

[Anonymous No.22626814]

>>22626802
Why would I need to define it? Everyone is already directly acquainted with what it is.

[Anonymous No.22626819]

>>22618647
He forgot to add autism in his biography.

[Anonymous No.22626825]

>>22626814
We're all "directly acquainted" with Santa Claus too. Does that mean Santa Claus exists?

[Anonymous No.22626829]

>>22626807
Yes but he defines consciousness to exclude phenomenal experience, and so in ever normal persons understanding of the word, he is denying it.

It's just a linguistic trick of his to be like "no no no consciousness exists its just not what we think it is", because if actually was made to plainly write what he's saying, he'd be laughed out of the room by anyone with a functioning brain.

>https://www.researchgate.net/publication/330717407_A_hundred_years_of_consciousness_a_long_training_in_absurdity

[Anonymous No.22626836]

>>22626825
I'm not going to argue with an idiot who denies he experiences anything.

[Anonymous No.22626840]

>>22626836
I don't deny my experiences. I just don't conflate them with "consciousness," which, colloquially understood, is a universally shared experience.

[Anonymous No.22626845]

>>22626829
>Yes but he defines consciousness
So then he believes that consciousness exists, you just don't like the definition. So, you admit to being wrong.

>It's just a linguistic trick
No two dualists can agree on what "consciousness" is, but physicalists can. So, physicalists are a step ahead of dualists.

[Anonymous No.22626849]

>>22626829
>he'd be laughed out of the room by anyone with a functioning brain.
You believe that you don't exist and don't experience anything because the little man watching your sensory perceptions on the screen that's piloting your body from inside your head is the real you experiencing what you aren't, I don't think that you have any room to call other people's theories of the mind "laughable".

[Anonymous No.22626852]

>>22626840
I don't care. Your sophistry isn't interesting. I only respond to call you a fucking idiot.

[Anonymous No.22626858]

>>22626840
>I'm fucking retarded

[Anonymous No.22626859]

>>22626852
You don't have a response because you're wrong.

[Anonymous No.22626862]

>>22626849
Nice strawman.

[Anonymous No.22626954]

>>22625719
>>22626781
Mary's room is wrong because it implicitly claims that humans, with their limited abilities of imagination and communication, are at the apex in terms of being able to draw conclusions from "indirect" experience.
A human cannot imagine a color they've never seen before just from reading books, but a more sophisticated type of intelligence definitely could.
Mary's room isn't the only argument for qualia, though, it's just a particularly bad one.

[Anonymous No.22627024]

>>22626862
You were just getting upset about Dennett believing that humans directly experience mental phenomena instead of parsing it to some other entity, so no it's not a strawman it's just what you believe. You just don't like it when people say it outright because it makes you sound ridiculous.

[Anonymous No.22627031]

>>22626954
>A human cannot imagine a color they've never seen before just from reading books
Color perception and processing is genetic. The colors that you can see are predetermined at birth as is your ability to "see" them in your mind. You'd have to turn off her dreams, imagination, and phosphenes.

[Anonymous No.22627105]

>>22627031
The point of Mary's room is that she never receives stimulus along those lines and thus never forms a memory that maps those lines. Blind people don't have sight in their dreams.

[Anonymous No.22627124]

>>22627105
>Blind people don't have sight in their dreams.
Actually some do, based on, again, whether or not their brains have visual processing systems that work or not. They don't see anything intelligible of course, but they do see things in dreams.

>The point of Mary's room is that she never receives stimulus along those lines and thus never forms a memory that maps those lines.
The brain is capable of generating sensory data independent of external stimulus. She doesn't need to have ever seen a color to imagine it. She would never have seen it with her eyes, but she wouldn't be gaining anything other than the memory of having seen it with her eyes as opposed to her mind. You could argue that it would be gibberish, and in her colorless environment it would indeed be meaningless.

This is ignoring the fact that the cones are actually used to process "black and white" in a functioning eye, so you'd basically have to maim her and then give her her new eyes to actually make the setup work.

[Anonymous No.22628331]

>>22617060
Speaking of the Devil...

https://web.archive.org/web/20231022003614/https://www.newstatesman.com/the-weekend-essay/2023/10/philosopher-daniel-dennett

[Anonymous No.22628336]

based and Thoreauvian-pilled

[Anonymous No.22628484]

>>22626804
You misunderstood the question.
He's talking about inner experience, and you're talking about behavior.

[Anonymous No.22629139]

>>22628484
No, he asked about behavior. Not that it matters because we know what causes the inner experience and can compare that.

[Anonymous No.22629786]

I'll make another attempt at explaining this, in the vain hope that at least one anon will benefit from this.

First of all, your *beliefs* about your conscious experience aren't given in a way that your conscious experience is (veritably). Hammer that distinction into your skull before proceeding.

In other words, it's not about claiming that your conscious experience doesn't exist. It's about accepting the possibility that your beliefs about the explanatory mechanisms behind the contents of your conscious experience, its sources and consequences may be wrong. The illusion in illusionism is not about conscious experience not existing, but conscious experience not being what it *seems to be*.

If you have no problem entertaining the idea that free will might be an illusion, then you should be able to wrap your head around eliminativism too. Unless, like Searle, you hold that the existence of free will is obviously given, because "I decide to raise my hand and the damn thing goes up!". Bullshit, your belief that you have free will is no proof that you have free will. Your strongly held belief that representations of consciousness are qualitative, ineffable, continuous and, most importantly, unexplainable in physical terms is no unshakable proof that they actually are so. Again, your conscious experience is one thing and what you believe about it is another.

One aim of illusionism is to remove an intermediary step that's not only theoretically extraneous, but logically inconsistent: the phenomenal fallacy. Again, phenomenological fallacy is NOT the view that phenomenality exists at all. The paper (Illusionism as the Obvious Default Theory of Consciousness) clearly defines what it is and it amounts to the cartesian theater.

I believe that I'm a spectator in a cartesian theater, so the damn thing must work exactly as I think it does! That's the intuition that's challenged here. There is no place and time in the mind where "it all comes together for the observer." This one is easy, because it's a straightforward infinite regress of observers. It's not even physicalism vs. intuition, it's logic vs. intuition.

>>22622107
Another point is brought up by the visual illusion of reverse color afterimage. The false intuition attacked here is that you believe that you see a red stripe because you have a conscious experience of a red stripe. In fact the causality is exactly reversed: you have a conscious experience of a red stripe because you believe there is a red stripe.

Because there is no real, physical red stripe to influence your brain, the illusion helps to highlight this. The conscious experience of the red stripe is there, but it cannot be what you think it is, it must be constructed by your mind. Same in normal perception.

From there you can begin to see how "qualia" can be understood as a special kind of beliefs (even if your intuitions stubbornly remain).

>>22623464
>The paper says that there is no phenomenality
Are you the philosophy PhD?

[Anonymous No.22629883]

>>22618860
>>22619081
>>22624294
Why be mean to an autist who doesn't want the fly to suffer? It's neurotypicals who don't care at all about all the suffering in the world and then they call this guy a serial killer bugman.

[Anonymous No.22630079]

>>22629883
Found the psychopath

[Anonymous No.22630753]

>>22629786
I think you just literally don't understand illusionism

>Because there is no real, physical red stripe to influence your brain, the illusion helps to highlight this. The conscious experience of the red stripe is there, but it cannot be what you think it is, it must be constructed by your mind. Same in normal perception.

This is just indirect realism/representationialism. It's basically the standard scientific view of the world. The brain produces internal representations of a self/world model which is what our conscious experience is.

Illusionism is that this is wrong, and we are merely robots with no phenomenal internal life who simply enters belief states that its representations are phenomenal. It's like a cd "thinking" the Soundwave represented by physical grooves (or whatever) have the phenomenal quality of 'what it is like to hear something'. But it's just a physical cd.

[Anonymous No.22630757]

>>22629883
That guy literally denies the existence of phenomenal consciousness. I'm not joking. He thinks flies are robots.

[Anonymous No.22630767]

>>22630757
But he doesn't. Some guy even posted pics of him saying that he doesn't.

[Anonymous No.22630794]

Help clear this up for me please.
Consider the following statement:
>There seems to be an experience of being myself at this particular time and place in my room, and I'm looking at a screen, thinking about illusionism, and writing this post.
Are illusionists such as Dennett and Frankish claiming that "what seems to be" is an illusion i.e. it's not what it seems to be (whether that means physical reality is different or that "what seems to be" is a kind of composite like how a musical chord is several separate notes combining to make "one chord" but the chord isn't really there), or are they claiming that "that something seems to be" is the illusion i.e. "seeming to be" isn't happening at all?

If it's the former then they're just extremely autistically rehashing in an incoherent framework (physicalism) something fairly obvious that's already been written about much more coherently for 1000s of years, and in doing so they've done absolutely nothing to the hard problem. If it's the latter then I'm inclined to believe they're actually just retarded. Is it neither? In any case, physicalism indeed entails that there is no kind of consciousness/experience at all. If they're trying to say "no no physicalism is true but there's still an illusory composite consciousness/experience" then they're just closeted dualists.

[Anonymous No.22630801]

>>22630753
Going off of the definition of David Chalmers (who is a dualist) no, that's not what Illusionism is at all. Illusionists are the most forgiving of phenomenological thought of all materialists. Illusionists believe that mental phenomena occur as if there's some special "consciousness" that is a real meaningful object that has existence separate from second-to-second processing by the brain, but there really isn't, we just think there is. That doesn't mean that there's no "internal life" (because again, the brain can take its own contents as inputs for processing) or "experience" or "the subconscious conscious experiencing of experiential non-experienced qualia of experience" or whatever word salad you want to use to say "mental phenomena": it means that there is mental phenomena, but there's no unifying entity ("consciousness" as a noun rather than an adjective) that exists separate from the brain.

To put it another way: dualists believe that if a God froze time and looked in your head, they'd find "a consciousness" that could be plucked out and put in a box, or in someone else's head, or in a rock. Materialists (technically you can do this without materialism but whatever, no one does that) believe that this is not the case and that "consciousness" is only meaningful as a process over time; a brain frozen in time is just a bunch of atoms and has nothing special about it, it's only due to mental activity over time that the mind (a process) occurs.

Non-illusionist materialists believe that mental phenomena does not actually occur as if there was "a consciousness", just "consciousness"; Illusionists believe that mental phenomena DOES occur as if there was "a consciousness" even though there isn't one, there's really just "consciousness". That's the "illusion".

My critique of Dennett and the like is that he doesn't recognize that this is just a materialist form of panpsychism and embrace that.

[Anonymous No.22630807]

I am an eliminative materialist AMA

[Anonymous No.22630813]

>>22630794
Are they just trying to say that a statement such as "I see my screen" is wrong because there's no "I" that sees, and no seeing, and no screen, but there's just "that which is labelled 'I see my screen'"? The "I see" and "my screen" is an illusory re-representation or composite of "that" which is a representation of something physical? I'm more or less with this up until it invokes something physical. But it seems like they're then also denying "that" too, and they would have to be in order to say anything useful about the hard problem which seems to be the intended purpose of their projects.

[Anonymous No.22630816]

>>22629786
>>22630801
It's interesting to me that these debates are really just a cover for arguing about the epistemological question of whether you can trust your mind to accurately describe reality or reality to accurately describe your mind.

[Anonymous No.22630820]

>>22630816
"Trust" is just how primed you are to change your mind when you are inevitably proven wrong.

[Anonymous No.22630822]

>>22630753
I'm not discussing the necessary and sufficient condition for illusionism in that bit, you mental midget. I'm giving an example in service of a broader point. The more I explain, the more your limited reading comprehension gets in the way.

>Illusionism is [that we have] no phenomenal internal life [and simply enter] belief states that its representations are phenomenal.
This actually could be pretty accurate, if interpreted in the most generous way and depending on what exactly you mean by "phenomenal".
It's like a cd "thinking" the Soundwave represented by physical grooves (or whatever) have the phenomenal quality of 'what it is like to hear something'. But it's just a physical cd.
But of course, unlike certain incompetent readers, I cannot just ignore the very next sentence and the way it relates to the previous one. And that next sentence completely invalidates this somewhat promising account.
>I think you just literally don't understand illusionism
How fucking rich.

[Anonymous No.22630823]

>>22617060
Can someone explain what the book claims?

[Anonymous No.22630836]

>>22630794
It's the latter, and yes it's that retarded. It's so retarded in fact, that many legitimate philosophers have claimed it to be the worst idea in the history of philosophy.

>https://www.researchgate.net/publication/330717407_A_hundred_years_of_consciousness_a_long_training_in_absurdity

[Anonymous No.22630849]

>>22630801
This is just wrong. The illusionists have no need for panlsychism BECAUSE THEY DENY PHENOMENAL CONSCIOUSNESS.

>https://philpapers.org/rec/DENIAT-3

Daniel dennnet has literally said we are p-zombies. We have no phenomenal internal life. It's not about some some sort of phenomenological illusion that we think we are souls or ego or "subjects of experience" or "observers in the brain" (although they do say this) the illusion they are claiming is THAT THERE IS phenomenal experience at all.

It is quite literally the claim that humans are in essence p-zombies, and we enter belief states that we are not.

[Anonymous No.22630851]

>>22630807
How many times were dropped on your head as a baby? 50? 100? Are you currently drooling a lot, or just a little? Does your mother complain about the constant smell of piss emanating from you?

[Anonymous No.22630858]

>>22630794
It's the former, but many are too dumb to wrap their heads about the details, so they insist it has to be the latter. That renowned philosophers are either playing dumb or are literal p-zombies.

[Anonymous No.22630863]

>>22630822
You have to be dumb as fuck to think illusionism is just making the trivial claim that we aren't homonculus in a brain being presented with experience. Obviously.

[Anonymous No.22630868]

>>22630801
Very good outline, except for the last sentence (at least it's very strange on its face and needs to be elaborated on, if it makes some sense, then I don't see it). I sure hope some dum dum with an attention span of a goldfish doesn't latch on to that sentence and lash out lmao.

[Anonymous No.22630873]

>>22630863
Second chance at reading comprehension, failed in the exact same way.

LMAO

Tell us, are you the philosophy PhD? I have to know.

[Anonymous No.22630929]

>>22630836
>It's the latter
>>22630858
>It's the former
Physical processes have caused the belief "I read these posts" which has resulted in the illusion of me experiencing frustration.

[Anonymous No.22630937]

>>22630868
Thanks, I ran out of characters and have to go, so I threw that in as a little bit of bait to ward off accusations of being Dennett or a zombie or something. I'll write up my argument at a later date.

[Anonymous No.22631060]

>>22630873
Why don't you actually read his literal words

[Anonymous No.22631076]

For a clear picture of what dennet believes read this. He is denying appearances. There is NOTHING it is like to see a red anything. No phenomenal appearance, no sensation.

[Anonymous No.22631086]

>>22631076
So, we think what we see exists because we want it to?

[Anonymous No.22631305]

>>22631086
I dunno the guy is a fucking retard ask him. I don't know why illusionists aren't just laughed out of the room or directed to a psychiatrist.

How can anyone look at a colored object, and deny there is anything it is like to be doing so, and the accuse others of invoking magic and supernatural entities when they say "yeah the visual sensation looks orange to me".

I mean genuinely, this is just laughable philosophy.

[Anonymous No.22631568]

>>22630816
They aren't though. The illusionists claim that they are arguing this, and that this is what is under dispute, but:

a) I don't know anyone who disputes this idea in general. Of course our descriptions/understanding of our own mental phenomena can be hazy, unclear and/or subject to delusion. People aren't denying this, they are denying that "qualia themselves" can meaningfully be called illusions, when they simply are what is being experienced, and they ARE THAT, and that IS, regardless of how we explain them.
b) When it comes down to it, the illusionists really claim that (though they try to dance around this), simply because there is (possibly necessarily) a causal explanation of your behavior in terms of the physical, that mental phenomena aren't significant and basically don't matter or can be, not simply *explained* (in terms of correspondence, or causal reduction), but *explained AWAY*, like they are basically ultimately nothing because our understanding of them can be criticized.

This is what is being objected to.

[Anonymous No.22631594]

Here's how illusionists argue:

>*demonstrates your blindspot*
>*demonstrates your peripherals are colour blind*
>*demonstrates you can undergo change blindness*
>therefore, humans are p-zombies amd anyone claiming otherwise is invoking magic and this is the default scientific theory and it would be ludicrous to suggest otherwise *smug grin*

[Anonymous No.22631612]

In the time it took you all to read to learn this stuff, plus the time you're spending arguing about it, I wonder how many times you could've read the complete works of Pynchon.

It would have been a better use of your time for all of you.

[Anonymous No.22631894]

>>22630937
>Thanks, I ran out of characters and have to go, so I threw that in as a little bit of bait to ward off accusations of being Dennett or a zombie or something. I'll write up my argument at a later date.
Didn't work lmao.

[Anonymous No.22631940]

>>22617208
I'm not an Edward Feser fan (I'm Orthodox and he's a Thomist) but his philosophy of mind book is solid. It goes over all of this.

[Anonymous No.22632034]

>>22619446
>>22619651
I've been following your back-and-forth. I'm the Ortho anon who recommended the Feser book. I've only got a B.A. in CogSci with a religious Studies minor from one of the better US public universities, and I'm nearly as old as professor anon. I might be a bit behind you guys but I do know that your positions are compatible.

That's what led Eugene (later Fr. Seraphim) Rose from academia to the heart of the Orthodox tradition. Truth is super-rational in origin, but not irrational. The first part of Nihilism: the Root of the Revolution of the Modern Age is directed specifically against Denett types and anyone who says truth is unknowable.

My point is it's possible for the true tradition to have a super-rational mystical initiatory core, but for the expression of the Truth gained from that to be in the form of a coherent, rational, and epistemologically justified philosophical system. You can have your Anthony the Great along with your Maximus the Confessor

This would be in contrast to Feser (thomist) types who make theology a purely classical foundationalist philosophical project (as good as his philosophy of mind textbook is)

[Anonymous No.22632085]

None of you retards understand dennet. Put it like this:

we are subject to perceptual illusions, some of them extreme - change blindness, our visual fields being almost entirely black and white amorphous blobs with a tiny center of detail, two freaking blindspots right in front of our eyes

OK, then why the fuck should we not also consider that we could not be the subject of an introspective illusion? That we "look inside" we think there is an internal private little world of sensation that nobody could access and only belongs to me forever and always and beyond the limits of all science?

It seems the response is just, well I just know I'm not subject to an illusion. How? I just know. No you don't. You're insane! You're denying consciousness! You're a retard idiot loser! Etc etc

It's kind of like Christian retards saying they feel God's presence. Prove it! I can't I just feel him. Can he be measured? No but he's there. How do you know? Oh I just know. Why cant I feel him? You can but you deny it.

[Anonymous No.22632119]

>>22632085
>our visual fields being almost entirely black and white amorphous blobs with a tiny center of detail, two freaking blindspots right in front of our eyes
That's wrong in detail and the dumdums are bound to hyperfocus on it. The peripheral vision is not literally black and white just because you can't discriminate colors in there, it's subject to filling-in. The blind spots are not literally empty, they are constructed in interesting ways (vide Ramachandran's research). That is true at least when paying direct attention to the periphery, of course it makes no sense to claim that in any other circumstances.

In general, your explanation is crude, but it can pass. We have tried subtle, elaborate explanations, but they weren't understood.

In general, I think the real prerequisite is chewing through enough cognitive psychology. The science can undermine a lot of implicit assumptions about our phenomenology, but it needs to be worked through and internalized first. Professional philosophers who cannot entertain the kind of skepticism that illusionism calls for are the ones who didn't do that work. It explains why illusionism is closer to interdisciplinary circles of cognitive science and its detractors come from pure philosophy.

Try to explain it to someone without a scientific background and you hit a wall, like here: >>22631594. Even those in the consciousness studies fundamentally opposed to illusionism, like the mentioned Chalmers, at least understand it and don't reduce it to HURR DURR WE UR P-ZOMBIES.

[Anonymous No.22632291]

I wouldn't go so far as to say it's "dumb" - Philosophy is full of serious disagreements concerning the most basic and fundamental aspects of reality, where often what seems to one person self-evident in the extreme is not self-evident at all to someone else. I have to say though that I personally find it impossible to accept the arguments Dennett makes.

David Bentley Hart is very good at describing in detail the problems with this brand of physicalism many people have:
www.thenewatlantis.com/publications/the-illusionist

[Anonymous No.22632639]

>>22626153
Not everyone shares your faggot nihilism. Not once have you attempted to base your argument in the problem of the physics of energy and how it builds up consciousness, which is what matters, not your Darwinist-nihilist nonsense. Nothing but nihilist word vomit that can be thrown under the p-zombie catagory.

[Anonymous No.22632674]

>>22632639
>same anons who seethe at Dennett think that Nietzsche is a nihilist
zero surprise lmao

[Anonymous No.22632704]

>>22632674
I didn't say that, I said that prior anon is a nihilist who boils everything down to muh biology/evolution, while ignoring the topic of the laws of energy & consequently consciousness, indicating a complete lack of understanding of the more fundamental, reductionary level. The fact he ignores this and keeps blabbering his nonsense is proof enough that has has a superficial, non-physics based "understanding" of the hard problem of consciousness.

[Anonymous No.22632787]

>>22632119
Scientific explanations of qualia/consciousness are doomed no matter how you try to weasel out of the criticisms of your favorite attempt.

You can never establish a causal relationship between the observed and the observed and the observer. It confuses subject and object. With all forms of physicalism you either wind up. With gradations of denying the subject (dennnett), or else special pleading (epiphenominalism).

[Anonymous No.22632792]

>>22632787
*between the observed and the observer

[Anonymous No.22632843]

>>22632787
>It confuses subject and object.
That's a new one. Just because the subject is reduced to its functional parts doesn't mean that its existence is denied or that it's confused for its constituents. Obviously. Unless, of course, you dogmatically assume some christcuck notion of irreducable personhood.

[Anonymous No.22632921]

>>22632843
> seething at Christianity out of nowhere

No, I'm saying that you can't "reduce it to its functional parts" or observe it through empirical observations of matter 'at all'. Empirical observation by definition places a wall between subject (observer, scientist) and the object (matter, things-distinct-from-the-subject-making-the-observation). The only way to observe the subject is through intuition, not empirical observation of matter that is not, to the observer, the subject

[Anonymous No.22633094]

To anyone hand waving that dennet doesn't deny consciousness read his own words.

Yes, he is literally that retarded.

[Anonymous No.22633107]

>>22633094
This is the dumbest idea in the history of philosophy - "humans are equivalent to mindless robots."

[Anonymous No.22633198]

>>22633094
I know it's hard to understand that admitting the possibility of quantifying qualia is not the same as denying the existence of consciousness, but you really should stop embarrassing yourself.
>>22632921
>all that confusion
Oh, it's not a new one after all. Is the reduction of the subject a contradiction in terms like you originally claimed or is it now simply impossible because you can't imagine how it could be done? It's the latter of course, and it's not an argument. Putting aside the fact that you arguably equivocate on "observation", it's not like you even need to observe a phenomenon to explain it. Obviously.

[Anonymous No.22633250]

>>22633198
God you retards are insufferable

>we all understand what we mean by consciousness is right guys - the felt quality of experience, the way the sensations feel? Sure.
DENNET: I deny these feelings!
>you are denying consciousness then, thats retarded we all obviously feel things
NOPE. NOT DENYING CONSCIOUSNSSS. JUST REDEFINING THE WORD SO ITS EXCLUDES THE ONLY THING THAT MAKES IT MEANJNGFUL LALALAL YOU CANT ACCUSE ME OF DENYING ANYTHING IM JUST SAYING IT ISNT WHAT WE THINK IT IS!!!
>uhh Mr dennet, you are literally saying we are as internally aware as robots, play these stupid word games all you like you are denying something so obvious to every human that it's hard to even tell if you're being serious
IM NOT DENYING IT!! STOP INVOKING MAGIC!!! REEEEEEEEE YOURE NOT CONSCIOUS REEEEEE!!!!! REEEE!!!!!!

[Anonymous No.22633267]

Consciousness is made out of words. God and (sometimes fallen) angels intercede through schizophrenia.

[Anonymous No.22633287]

>>22633198
My original claim was that any observation made about the subject through objective rather than subjective (notice the roots of those words? Object and subject?) means is inherently a confusion of subject and object.

You're clearly either stupid or a bad actor for trying to characterize this clear and consistent point any other way. Physicalism is for slaves and slaves alone

[Anonymous No.22633328]

Can we make up a new mental disorder called physicalism? This is batshit insane..

[Anonymous No.22633479]

>>22631612
Only worthwhile post itt

[Anonymous No.22633605]

>>22633287
>notice the roots of those words? Object and subject?
lmao no shit Sherlock. No wonder you're so impossible to educate if you congratulate yourself on noticing something like that. If you ponder the high school science concept of unobservables, like I hinted at, you might notice even smarter things. And if a word like "equivocate" gives you trouble, you can just google it. I'm mentioning both of these points again, because it's like they went completely over your head. I understood and addressed your pedestrian point just fine. Obviously.
>>22633250
Thanks for outlining your thought process, but I already guessed how it goes. Mistake on Dennett's first line already.

[Anonymous No.22633614]

>>22630937
>I'll write up my argument at a later date.
Please do, so that I get SOMETHING valuable out of this thread.

[Anonymous No.22633732]

I found this quote from dennet. I don't really understand this shit. He says we are p-zombies because in an objective sense a science of consciousness has no need to account for example how this blue of my monitor looks to me, because that's not an actual thing in the physical world. No "blueness" in my neurons or the electro-chemical reactions that they do, or really even more fundamentally the particles of physics (which I'm too stupid to understand).

I suppose my first response is just.. I don't even understand what it means to say this doesn't exist? It's literally everything I've ever known, it's everything that makes ethics real, it's all the pain and suffering I've felt. If it doesn't exist I might as well be dead what's the difference? But I'm not dead because I can literally see my fingers typing this sentence.

I don't get it. How can someone deny sensations? Why even have laws you can't wrong anyone!

Even if it is some sort of "illusion" wmof physics I fail to see how that makes a difference. My entire being and your being is this illusion. I can't turn it off either.

[Anonymous No.22633790]

We use observations to study brains, but if observations are illusions then how do we know anything?

[Anonymous No.22633932]

>>22632085
>we are subject to perceptual illusions
Dualists reject this as they believe that mental phenomena exist independent of any sort of cause. See >>22631568. They completely reject the idea of illusions as an ontological class.

>>22632787
>You can never establish a causal relationship between the observed and the observed and the observer.
Yes we can. It's very easy.

>>22633094
This was already posted, and people already pointed out that he literally says that you are wrong in it.

[Anonymous No.22633967]

Are illusionists just trying to say (or misinterpreted as saying) that I'm not conscious because
1. there's no "I" entity to be conscious and
2. consciousness isn't a single thing or process to be or to be had, but many physical processes self-reporting and communicating which somehow creates the illusion of unified internal mentation (whatever that means)?
When you think "I see an apple", it's really the component processes or parts of the brain that are "I", seeing, the various properties of apples, and memories of seeing apples etc, that are thinking and experiencing "I see an apple"? So with these very awkward semantics Illusionists can say that you don't see an apple and there is no apple qualia. And then somehow this proves physicalism is true and solves the hard problem.
I'm giving the benefit of the doubt and assuming my ignorance because this really can't be all they're trying to say?

The only other charitable interpretation I have is that there's no qualia because what we experience isn't a private internal mental representation of the physical world but just the physical world directly. When I see an apple, I'm not experiencing apple qualia, but literally just the physical apple. But this I don't think they're saying.

This thread has got me THIS close to reading some of the relevant material but I have to read the complete works of Pynchon first.

[Anonymous No.22633975]

>>22633732
>He says we are p-zombies
No he doesn't. He completely rejects the idea of a p-zombie on the grounds that anything that displays the attributes of mental phenomena is actually experiencing them. He believes that brains generate mental phenomena, and that brains cause the body to move (to put it bluntly). He completely rejects the idea of the body moving and there "being nothing there". "We're all all zombies" because a p-zombie is by definition indistinguishable from an actual human under his philosophy (because, again you can't have "a body that seems conscious" without it actually being conscious).

>because that's not an actual thing in the physical world
His argument is that the "blueness" when you see a blue image is the result of neurological activity. It's a process, you can't put it in a bucket. Yes, it's not an object, because it's like a race (as in running): you cannot have a race independent of running, you cannot have a race independent of movement (in this case literal) over time. This is why it's not "in" the neurons or the chemical reactions, because the neurons/chemical-reactions make the "blueness", just like how the race isn't in the runners, it's something that they generate by running

>I don't even understand what it means to say this doesn't exist?
This is why Dennett is an illusionist: you assume that your brain works a certain way, but it actually doesn't. That's the illusion.

>If it doesn't exist
It does exist, he's just arguing over what "exist" means.

Think of like a fire: it's made of parts, and it only has any meaning when it's moving. There's no one item that's "the fire", and if you stop the process it goes away. It's only "a fire" across time, if you froze time and looked at then it would just be wood, CO2, electromagnetic radiation, and bits of incomplete combustion (technically your vision and hearing would be radically fucked up due to the freezing of light and soundwaves but whatever). All Dennett is saying is that the mind is like a fire, but we don't think that it is unless we actually start thinking about it.

[Anonymous No.22633979]

Why can't people just admit panpsychism, where consciousness is a quality of matter itself, and have consciousness and materialism co-exist without issue?

[Anonymous No.22633990]

>>22633967
>there's no "I" entity to be conscious and
Correct. "Consciousness" isn't an object hiding in the brain, it's the noun referring to the abstract process of a brain that is conscious (which means that it can take its own activity as inputs for further activity). We don't THINK that it's like this, we THINK that there's a secret object hidden in our brain that is the "real me" piloting me, but there isn't one. Hence "illusion"ism.

>consciousness isn't a single thing or process to be or to be had, but many physical processes self-reporting and communicating which somehow creates the illusion of unified internal mentation (whatever that means)?
I suppose you can just keep combining processes and say that it's just one single process, it's not like the brain leaks thoughts or something, but yes up until
>creates the illusion of unified internal mentation (whatever that means)?
The feeling of unification isn't the illusion, the belief that there's an "object" inside your head that is the "real you" is the illusion. The feeling of unification is just a feeling resulting from certain brain processes that unify mental activity, you can make it go away with meditation, drugs, or brain damage. The particularly fedora tippy types will point out that this is an evolved survival mechanism because the people who do experience this due to brain damage are all kinds of fucked up and can't function coherently.

>When you think "I see an apple", it's really the component processes or parts of the brain that are "I", seeing, the various properties of apples, and memories of seeing apples etc, that are thinking and experiencing "I see an apple"?
Correct, it's a complex mental process that feeds data into many processing centers which then bundle the data together and pass them to various other centers that result in action.

>So with these very awkward semantics Illusionists can say that you don't see an apple and there is no apple qualia.
Physicalists either believe that the term "qualia" is meaningless because no two dualists can agree on what qualia are, or accept that it's a valid term to refer to SOMETHING, they just argue that qualia are the result of neurological activity and only have any existence due to neurological activity over time.

>solves the hard problem.
Physicalists don't believe that there's a hard problem at all, they believe that brains doing brain stuff over time generates mental phenomena. By definition only dualists believe that there's a hard problem as they're the only ones who believe that there's an unbreachable gap between mind and matter.

>what we experience isn't a private internal mental representation of the physical world but just the physical world directly
Correct, physicalists believe this (in as much as your brain isn't hooked up to someone else's your brain is "private", however).

[Anonymous No.22634006]

>>22633990
>When I see an apple, I'm not experiencing apple qualia, but literally just the physical apple
It's more proper to say that physicalists believe that what you are calling "qualia" is actually part of the experiencing of the apple. As in, "qualia" are generated by brains as part of the direct physical contact with the apple (in as much as photons bouncing off the apple and hitting your rods/cones is "physical").

>But this I don't think they're saying.
This is where the really cringey line about "we're the universe looking at itself" comes from. It's a form of monism, as a third party observer makes no distinction between the atoms moving around that make up you and the atoms moving around that make up your car. There's bundles of neurons doing their thing, and we humans (the meaningful definition of "human" in this discussion, bundles of mental phenomena not hearts and bones) are the result of some of those atoms moving around.

>>22633979
Physicalism taken to its logical conclusion absolutely implies a sort of panpsychism or hylozooism, and this is actually something that discomforts a lot of physicalists because they entered physicalism through the successes of neuroscience and find themselves back at Thales. If a brain can be a bunch of atoms and be "conscious", what's to stop Pando (the big aspen colony out in Utah) from also being conscious (if just on a slower scale)? What's to stop a sufficiently smart neural network running on a computer, or some kind of weird plasma structure on the sun, from being "conscious"? What's to stop entire nations, or the entire planet, or the Milky Way, or the totality of the universe from "being conscious"?

Absolutely nothing. The Mahayana tradition ran into similar problems a thousand years ago, and they came to these conclusions because unlike physicalists they weren't afraid to take these thoughts to their logical conclusion.

(This is the criticism I mentioned in >>22630937)

[Anonymous No.22634015]

>>22634006
>>22633990
To clarify a point: From your point of view, all you can see is atoms moving around, as your brain isn't hooked up to someone else's so your mental phenomena aren't "in contact" with theirs (that is, the process-generating phenomena are not linked together). You can only do approximations, like touching them, causing their nerves to register activity, which is in a sense a form of "combining mental phenomena", albeit a very crude form. This is part of why p-zombies don't exist under physicalism as there's no way to generate a convincing human without actually generating a human.

[Anonymous No.22634044]

>>22619511
So learning more about pain will make me feel pain more strongly? Would it make a difference? Let's say for example:

Live a life of pain --> Clueless --> Shoots self in head

Live a life of pain --> Aware --> Shoots self in head

The fact that the same pain can be experienced in different ways before arriving at the same conclusion betrays consciousness exists.

[Anonymous No.22634072]

>>22633990
>>22634006
Thanks. I suppose I'm a little bit disappointed that it is more or less what I think it is, but perhaps that's my fault for expecting something more novel. I'm relatively well versed in buddhism, advaita, et al. and it did seem like illusionism was very confusingly talking largely about concepts such as "non-self" which is at least as old as buddhism.
I agree with most of what you said except I lean towards idealism rather than physicalism or panpsychism. And Idealism of course has no hard problem because in that case everything is mind. That there's no hard problem under idealism is easy enough to understand but I still struggle to understand how the illusionist can claim there's no hard problem under physicalism without attempting to totally deny consciousness/mind. It seems to me like saying consciousness/mind is also physical is just hand-waving.

[Anonymous No.22634175]

>>22633975
To anyone reading this thread, this is completely wrong btw. Even a cursory read of frankish, kammerer, or even the posts from dennet in this thread will directly show this is completely misinformed

[Anonymous No.22634181]

>>22633979
Because that's "magic" and the braindead physicalists who cannot cope with their own sensations existing prefer a mindless world to the rich world of sensations and feelings given to us by the will of God.

What do all these physicalists have in common? Atheism.

They are depressed souls who reject God's creation and love and it causes them great pain and so try to resolve this suffering by just denying it exists. But it will always remain. I feel sorry for dennet. He is 80+ years old and will soon go to he'll because he spent his entire life doing the devils work and convincing people to stray from gods light. He will be rightly punished and let his example serve to anyone in this thread and world - reject God at your own peril.

[Anonymous No.22634187]

>>22634006
You're actually retarded and genuinely think illusionism = souls in the brain don't exist.

[Anonymous No.22634189]

>>22634072
The guy responding to you is completely, utterly confused about illusionism

[Anonymous No.22634206]

>>22617060
>"What do you think of the mind body problem and the hard problem of consciousness?"
>"It doesn't exist because I said so"
>"....That doesn't solve the pro-"
>"IT DOESN'T EXIST!"
>REEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE

It is astonishing how much these people are willing to bend reality around them so that their retardation can make sense. Especially in regards to consciousness, arguably one of the most interesting and mysterious things (thing?) that exists in the universe...Or at least interacts with what we know as as the universe.

[Anonymous No.22634252]

>>22634187
>>22634175
Why not just read what Dennett himself, who is as far as I'm concerned the illusionmeister, has to say? It was posted upthread twice. How many threads to you have to be told that you are wrong before you bother to take a cursory examination of the subject at hand?

[Anonymous No.22634258]

>>22634206
It's even worse. We THEORIZE an external world to account for consciousness. These retards are like omg our theory can't account for it! Consciousness mustnt exist!!!

[Anonymous No.22634279]

Why is it so hard to get a straight answer on whether this boomer thinks consciousness literally doesn't exist or not? I took a philosophy course that briefly touched on him and even then what he meant by consciousness being an "illusion" was never made clear. For such a seemingly extreme position, you'd think he'd want people to know whether that's what he really thinks, or if it's all a big misunderstanding and he believes something much less outlandish.

[Anonymous No.22634286]

>>22634072
Part of the problem is that physicalism and the milieu it comes out of is deeply steeped in a combination of Logical Positivism and eliminative materialism. The Logical Positivists wanted a total break with prior European philosophy up until that point, and eliminative materialists want to completely rewrite how we talk about mental phenomena from the ground up. They're trying to reinvent the wheel like four times at once, and it makes discussion of these topics hard because they can't articulate concepts in a language that was designed to solve the problem of "okay but what the fuck are you actually saying". It's why I brought up that they're effectively monists, as it puts the discussion in language that has actual meaning.

>It seems to me like saying consciousness/mind is also physical is just hand-waving.
This would require them to properly elaborate their ontology, and at absolute minimum a fedora tipper has to admit that there are things other than just atoms because spacetime exists. They'd also have to admit that processes have some kind of meaningful ontological status on pain of making their philosophy worthless for actual usage by humans (Sam Harris is guilty of doing this). So, unless they're being incredibly rigid they'd probably have to admit to some kind of tiered ontology of something like
>Fundamental stuff (Elementary Particles, Spacetime, Fundamental Forces)
>Processes (the above moving around)
>Second order processes (the above in which a process is processes moving around)
>Recursive processes (the above in which a process can act upon itself)

I'm being speculative ala Deleuze's Speculative Realism here because physicalists are loathe to take this stuff farther than muh empiricism will let them.

[Anonymous No.22634289]

>>22634258
This, consciousness is literally by definition prior to anything, including the external world, we use it to theorize about.

[Anonymous No.22634342]

>>22634279
The reason why consciousness is so hated in modern science is because it is such a bizarre think that can't really be accounted for via any physical phenomenon. It is so wacky that you can even make the case that it isn't even from or of the material world or cosmos but comes from "somewhere else". This notion is extremely hated for not only insinuating some sort of metaphysical reality but it also hints at teleology being a thing again. Which is a big no no in modern science.

[Anonymous No.22634354]

>>22634279
The truth is that if he was made to plainly say what he was claiming, he'd be laughed out of the room. And so he has to hide behind word games like
>I'm not denying consciousness! I'm saying it isn't what we think it is!

When what he's saying is literally a denial of all standard accounts of consciousness.

Obviously, if someone just walks up to you and says hey you and me are both p-zombies (which despite what the retard in the thread continues to deny, has been claimed by dennet multiple times), your first response would be to either
1. Punch him in the face (deny this pain!)
Or
2. Suggest he visit a psychiatrist
Or
3. Literally write papers on how you suspect illusionists may in fact suffer a global aphantasia

So this gay boomer made a career of denying the obvious and will hopefully be looked back upon as we view the behaviorists today

[Anonymous No.22634425]

>>22634279
>>22634354
>For such a seemingly extreme position, you'd think he'd want people to know whether that's what he really thinks, or if it's all a big misunderstanding and he believes something much less outlandish.
He's published his stance several times, once in this thread (it got posted twice) and has written books on it. At least three anons in this thread have explained it.

The simple fact is that there's people on the internet who have made attacking this strawman of this dude "their thing". That's all there is to it.

[Anonymous No.22634731]

>>22632639
>>22632704
It's impossible to be reductive and therefore nihilistic in the denial of metaphysics and scientific laws because these things were born out of the subconscious desire to escape the biological, which is nihilistic to begin with. Arguing in favor of their existence is what is nihilistic.

Consciousness that is defined as "higher order" is fraudulent, megalomaniacal nonsense.

[Anonymous No.22634777]

>>22634044
I think you're on the right track here, although I might say the exact opposite: Don't we all notice that it's easier to moderate our pain when we understand why it's happening? Whereas on the other hand, sudden and misunderstood pains give way to immediate aversion.

[Anonymous No.22634796]

>>22633932
>they believe that mental phenomena exist independent of any sort of cause

I'm specifically not claiming that at all.

>>22633975
I agree with basically everything said here. If these arguments were how and what the illusionists argued, I'd have no disagreement with them whatsoever, except that (as >>22634175 says) this is not the case and they ultimately argue a position that is basically the opposite of what this claims they do. It's completely different to say "P-zombies cannot exist for metaphysical reasons, all isomorphically structured substrates causing similar actions over time *must* give rise to identical conscious experiences" then to say "we really are P-zombies, we just are tricked into thinking otherwise".