31–40 of 63 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Talking lions are just lions with trans-species communicating capabilities. In other words, completely different brains than regular lions. So, not lions.
Is a person missing half a brain, in a vegetable state with little hope for recovery not human?
First problem: philosophers are not divided into two camps, so Rothman is misinformed. Aristotelianism is another. But let's return to these "two camps" for a moment. Typically, these two purported camps are some variation of dualism and elimnativism. Both ultimately rest on the Cartesian metaphysical legacy. Dualism comes in a variety of forms. Examples include property dualism (Searle, though he denies it) and panp…
> On the other hand, eliminativism manages to take an even whackier view of things than dualism. Whereas dualism has painted itself into a corner by refusing to reexamine its suppositions, eliminativism "resolves" the problem by shutting its eyes, that is, by denying the existence of those things it must explain. As a result, it is an incoherent position. Not even remotely. I'm not even sure how you could possibly fo…
First problem: philosophers are not divided into two camps, so Rothman is misinformed. Aristotelianism is another. But let's return to these "two camps" for a moment. Typically, these two purported camps are some variation of dualism and elimnativism. Both ultimately rest on the Cartesian metaphysical legacy. Dualism comes in a variety of forms. Examples include property dualism (Searle, though he denies it) and panp…
> On the other hand, eliminativism manages to take an even whackier view of things than dualism. Whereas dualism has painted itself into a corner by refusing to reexamine its suppositions, eliminativism "resolves" the problem by shutting its eyes, that is, by denying the existence of those things it must explain. As a result, it is an incoherent position. Not even remotely. I'm not even sure how you could possibly fo…
But can it? To say something is an illusion is to say that is really an experience of something else. And qualia are qualitative experiences, so the claim is that certain experiences are not experiences… which is problematic. Of course, a proper argument needs to be fleshed out more than that, but eliminativists face a real difficulty, unless they broaden the definition of materialism (which would take us closer to Aristotle).
> “Right,” Dennett replied. “He would be so different from regular lions that he wouldn’t tell us what it’s like to be a lion. I think we should just get used to the fact that the human concepts we apply so comfortably in our everyday lives apply only sort of to animals.” That's just silly. We taught Koko the gorilla how to talk, the effort was supremely insightful in helping us to understand animal cognition. Animal…
There is, literally, a part of the brain that if you shut it off, you lose language. Dennett would have you believe that it's that one part that makes us human. That's an interesting position for him, considering (IIRC) his co-author Douglas Hofstadter (The Mind's I) has a sister who is a perfectly normal & functional adult except for her complete incapacity for language.
"Our folks’ third and last child, Molly, born in Palo Alto, was, sadly, not what anybody had thought. By four or so, Molly was visibly abnormal — not saying any words at all, nor absorbing any. It wasn’t autism; it was a profound brain malfunction, probably dating from birth or prior to birth, but what was wrong, nobody could say — no diagnosis. Molly just didn’t pick up any words, who knows why, and our Mom and Dad had such anguish for so long on Molly’s account, as did Laura and I. What bad luck."
https://prelectur.stanford.edu/lecturers/hofstadter/autolipo...
The second sentence of the quote does seem strongly opposed to what I know of Dennett's position.
I think my problem with Dennett boils down to the fact that he's a wet blanket =) His attitude would be fine if it really did seem like there was nothing more to be learned about consciousness. To me his perspective seems a lot like our primitive ancestors looking at the stars and calling them holes poked in the sky--case closed. But you don't have to believe in a soul or anything like that to suspect that there's so…
In the age of casual pseudoscience influencing the general public (homeopathy, the surge of meditation apps and methods, the supplement industry) then sure, Dennett is the odd man out. But from a hard science standpoint his is a hard philosophy to refute. No amount of "feeling" like there's some bigger or deeper meaning to it all changes the fact that consciousness is just a bunch of neurons firing in a biological co…
I think my problem with Dennett boils down to the fact that he's a wet blanket =) His attitude would be fine if it really did seem like there was nothing more to be learned about consciousness. To me his perspective seems a lot like our primitive ancestors looking at the stars and calling them holes poked in the sky--case closed. But you don't have to believe in a soul or anything like that to suspect that there's so…
> His attitude would be fine if it really did seem like there was nothing more to be learned about consciousness. On the contrary, he's just saying that conscious is not an irreducible phenomenon like some of his philosophical contemporaries believe. There's still a lot to learn about the reduction. In fact, his is the less lazy way out, because how consciousness reduces to physical laws is completely unknown, but if…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
In the age of casual pseudoscience influencing the general public (homeopathy, the surge of meditation apps and methods, the supplement industry) then sure, Dennett is the odd man out. But from a hard science standpoint his is a hard philosophy to refute. No amount of "feeling" like there's some bigger or deeper meaning to it all changes the fact that consciousness is just a bunch of neurons firing in a biological co…
I think it's unfair of you to lump meditation with homeopathy. The latter is obviously pseudoscience but there are many studies backing the former's claims to reduce anxiety, depression, etc.
Of course, what they really need to do is put their phone away and actually focus on, you know, nothing.
I would argue that this is a totally separate question. In terms of my core intuitions, I'm a hardcore dualist. Chalmers is my favorite philosopher. But the idea of something being "weakly conscious" makes plenty of sense to me. In fact, I have been weakly conscious--waking up from being knocked out for one reason or another. During the process of coming out if it, I remember being in a hazy state, where experiences didn't have the vividness or clarity that they normally do. Of course, it's possible that it's just my memories that are weak, but at any rate the idea that these experiences didn't have the full character of normal conscious experience doesn't strike me as any kind of evidence for materialism.
In my father's last months, I saw him medicated on morphine to the point of being near unconscious, and it's easy to imagine that he was having the same sort of weak experiences as I've had. None of this rattles my dualist intuitions at all.
What most dualists say is that it's incredibly mysterious that anything has any level of consciousness above zero. Saying consciousness doesn't need a special explanation because it's possible to be weakly conscious is like saying gravity doesn't need to be explained because it's possible for objects to have small amounts of gravitation. It's an unrelated issue.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Talking lions are just lions with trans-species communicating capabilities. In other words, completely different brains than regular lions. So, not lions.
Is a person missing half a brain, in a vegetable state with little hope for recovery not human?
There's a lot of talk in here about whether consciousness is binary, whether it can turn on and off like a lightswitch, as if that's a good proxy for dualism vs. materialism. I would argue that this is a totally separate question. In terms of my core intuitions, I'm a hardcore dualist. Chalmers is my favorite philosopher. But the idea of something being "weakly conscious" makes plenty of sense to me. In fact, I have…