It is time to give up the dualism introduced by the debate on consciousness

If we take the video game example literally, we establish a fictional context for the language in question, so we read all questions as in-game.. the answer to the character's question is: the world the character is in. A skyrim NPC character who asks that question, is (fictionally) correct to say 'skyrim', and so on.

Now, dropping that fictional context, we have to ask: what context is giving the words meaning now? If we take a physical/material context, then the answer is 'nothing' in virtue of there being no such person, no such space, etc. because by 'here' in the material context, we know 'here' refers to a point in space and time that the character does not exist at.

When I ask, "what was here before me?" you have to give me how you're assigning meanings to words. To tell me I'm operating in a fictional context when i say, "the earth" -- is fine, so be it, materialism is a kind of fiction which preserves the ordinary meaning of words.

But for that to be plausible, there has to be a context in which those meanings make sense at all.

Kant, and similar idealists, tried to give them a "categorical context" such that "here" refers to something like an implied geometrical aspect of perception; and "before" an implied temporal aspect; and so on, which constitute the fixed law-liuke background of perception.

So that this background treats materialist meanings as fictional, and idealist meanings as the literal ones -- OK, but that's still a meaningful question -- because "me" in the idealist context doesnt refer to the transcendental ego, it refers to the apparent body in apparent space and time. And the right answer is the fictional one, because in the literal context, there is no "me". In any case, this fictional context in which the question still makes complete sense, we call "materalist".

The onus is on you to make plausible why the insanity of a "fixed law-like perceptual background of the generation of perceptions as-if materialism were true" is the principle literal context vs., it being the fictional one.

everything is explained if the law-like features of fixed perceptiosn are derivative fictions that give rise to a fictional mental space of pretend objects, and their actual apparent structure is just in the world. Nothign is explained if its the reverse, indeed, you now have a very very veyr large number of problems on your hand explaining anything at all.

The only reason we find it plausible to treat an NPC as operating in a fictional context is because we have the material context to langauge to give the words literal meanings, and literaly, we find them false. There really isnt any such idealist context for ordinary langauge.

"What was here before me?" becomes meaningless in a pathological way: we cannot even say what it oculd me, if it were true.

For an NPC, we can say very easily, this is how we know its fictional: we know what it would mean for skyrim to exist, and it does not.

Non-kantian idealists who deny the meaningfulness of these questions arent saying "we know what it would mean for there to be a place before you existed, and its false" -- theyre saying the veyr words youre using never had, nor could even have, any meaning at all. This is plainly false. We know very well what it would mean for the proposition to be true: that space and time exist, that physical objects exist, that you are one, and you are located at some time in some point in space, and prior to that, something else was.

This is very simple, ordinary, obvious, language which is meaningful. Even if its meanignful in a fictional context, ie., it is all literally false, it is still meanignful. This means that this kind of radical anti-meaningfulness idealism is false, because there is a coherent system of meaning in which these propositions could be true, even if they arent.

What remains is to decide whether they are true. And given their truth explains everything, by abduction, we suppose -- as a category -- they are true.

[We are very much in speculative territory here of course, it is not a given that duplication or upload is possible at all for a human mind]

I would say that both A and B would claim to be X and have the "continuous"[1] experience to be X while agreeing that they are distinct persons. I think that the question of whether A or B, both, or neither is the true X, is not a scientific question, and as a philosophical question, a fairly empty one.

Regarding the challenge, I would expect that the consciousness would be forked: there is a "me" that would awake inside the machine and would be very glad to be alive, while the "me" outside would experience dying. This seems to go against the exclusiveness of the experience of being themselves, but assuming the existence of the magically perfect duplication, both would be valid experiences and again neither could make a claim about being the real me. I don't find this to be a contradiction.

An interesting question would be whether consciousness can be reunited after being forked.

But all of these scenarios have been explored extensively. Are you familiar with the Egan's "Permutation City"?

edit: I was not familiar with the functionalist position, but for the little I read, it seems to me that it is just a variant of the monist position. You could say I'm a functionalist I guess. Also I believe that we are fundamentally in agreement and we might just disagree with definitions of words.

[1] what does "continuous" even mean? Do one have a "continuous" experience of being yourself after a night's sleep? After anesthesia? After a coma?

>You cannot ask why consciousness exist.

Why consciousness exists? Here I just asked it.

>How can material world split infinitely at every infinitely small instance !

It does so by continuous motion described by a differential equation. I don't see any problem. If it did something else you would still ask why it does what it does.

The author demonstrates a common misunderstanding about medieval philosophy. The medieval Scholastic tradition does not maintain that the body and the soul were "distinct entities", or that matter was "vile". In fact that kind of thinking was the position of gnostic groups that Christian thinkers were resolutely opposed to. Read St Augustine's "Confessions" if you don't believe me.

Scholastic philosophers taught that body and soul were two components of the SAME entity, the human being, and that both were good because they were created by God. One good essence with two components, in other words. And while they claimed that the soul component was immaterial, that absolutely did NOT mean that the soul was not part of the natural world. To claim this is to seriously misunderstand their view of the physical world. To them, matter was only one component of creation.

The strict mind/body dualism was not introduced by medieval Scholastics, but rather by the advent of modernity in Descartes, and developed further by Kant and other enlightenment philosophers. In other words, this is very far from being a medieval problem - on the contrary, it a problem created by modern philosophy.

As for the author's equation between subjective experience and qualities of things, or his equation of processes in the brain with the mind itself, this just ignores the facts. Qualities we observe in nature are obviously distinct from the feelings they produce in us in many cases (beauty, sublimity, injustice, etc. produce distinct feelings like reverence, humility, anger), and if the mind were equivalent to brain processes, then certain powers of the mind that we obviously have would be impossible (such as our ability to reflect on those very same brain processes in ourselves).

Interpreting the hard problem as an epistemological problem looks trivial. There's nothing extraordinary in ignorance. The way you describe it implies we have the hard problem of ultrasound too.

I think it's ontological problem: structural description ontologically misses unobservable ideal substance, so the challenge is to provide a principle that would make ideal substance unnecessary. If you don't think too much, ideal substance ontologically solves consciousness, and it's not obvious how mere structural description can live without it.