
Daniel Dennett, Author of ‘Intuition Pumps and Other Tools for Thinking’ - krg
https://www.nytimes.com/2013/04/30/books/daniel-dennett-author-of-intuition-pumps-and-other-tools-for-thinking.html?smid=tw-share&_r=0
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fluidcruft
It's interesting because I'm from a neuroscience training and have
traditionally and reflexively and argumentatively sided with the idea that
things like consciousness and free will are emergent illusions.

However, I've recently had a crisis of confidence when for some reason I tried
to think about the fact that my experience of consciousness and color and etc
does actually exist somehow inside the universe and that others seem to
experience it similarly. Of course there's a similarity of physical structure
that's common to brains that have those experiences. But more from the point
of view of if you stumble upon some complex object for example, you could
wonder whether it is experiencing the illusion of free will. If that's all
purely emergent from known physical laws, we should be able to determine
whether a particular object possesses/produces the illusion, right? So, that
got me wondering what is the minimal hardware/spatial configuration that could
produce this sort of illusion and are illusions actually "something"? It seems
like it's presupposing that certain arrangements of matter generate
"illusions" and yet we seem to want to insist that at some level these
"illusions" don't really exist. How far down do illusions go? Some people are
born blind or deaf/have strokes, so the illusion of color vision or sound can
be isolated and removed from the illusion of consciousness. Do "and gates"
experience some sort of atomic illusion of "and"? Can the presence of illusion
be tested? Anyway, not sure I'm making a cogent statement, I'm still not
entirely clear on what's bothering me about this, but something "feels"
intuitively wrong/missing to me about the purely physical emergent
neuroscience approach now.

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manicbovine
Have you read any of David Chalmers' work? He attempts to provide a framework
for thinking analytically about qualia in "The Conscious Mind: In Search of a
Fundamental Theory." [1]

Nearly all of his papers are accessible via his website. [2]

[1] <http://consc.net/books/tcm/>

[2] <http://consc.net/papers.html>

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fluidcruft
Thank you for the book recommendation. I have not read David Chalmers' work,
but I have seen his name mentioned often. I've been trying to figure out where
to get started with learning about the current understanding of the mind-body
problem and keep getting recommendations to start back with the Greeks and
work forward (which seems both quite daunting but also baroque given lack of
influence from modern neuroscience). I think I'll start reading there. Thanks
again!

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momerath
I would also recommend The Ego Tunnel by Thomas Metzinger.

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Symbol
Makes me wish I had taken a class with him while at Tufts. It's a hard truth
that you can usually plot a good course through your university experience
AFTER you are finished.

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whtrbt
I got to see him speak in Melbourne last year, he has a very enjoyable
speaking manner. If I recall correctly, it covered looking at things from a
teleological perspective (as a tool for thinking, not as proposed fact) and
then free will and morality in relation to that. I'm not certain, but I think
there was the suggestion that believing we have free will is useful because it
makes us act as though we have free will!

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vinceguidry
> The elusive subjective conscious experience — the redness of red, the
> painfulness of pain — that philosophers call qualia? Sheer illusion.

I wonder if the qualia debate isn't just an elaborate exercise in missing the
point. Experience doesn't work the same way as matter, you can't subdivide it
until you get the "experiential atom". Divide an experience into parts, what
you get is separate experiences, each unique in their own right.

What if, instead of trying to define the "fundamental experience", we instead
acknowledged all experiences as unique, subjective to context and underlying
biology, and moved from there? Someone's experience of red will depend on his
rod/cone balance and his neuro-chemistry. He can think about a "abstract,
ultimate red" but that will be an experience of thinking about red, not an
actual ultimate red.

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mjgoins
That's pretty much Dennet's position.

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manicbovine
No, it's not. There is nothing to vary by Dennett's account. Our two "red
qualia" are exactly the same: non-existent.

Dennett argues (actually, he just asserts it over and over), that there is no
such thing as subjective experience, so to speak. He argues that, whether or
not my version of red is different than yours, we're sharing a common delusion
-- the delusion of subjective, conscious experience.

(Of course, we're aware of an experience, but more along the lines of a webcam
program that, upon sensing the color red, flips some boolean is_aware
variable.)

I'd add that -- ok, qualia have many variations. From where do we deduce that
it's a grand illusion? Matter has many different variations.

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vinceguidry
> He argues that, whether or not my version of red is different than yours,
> we're sharing a common delusion -- the delusion of subjective, conscious
> experience.

I don't think Dennett is arguing that we're all zimboes.

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philosophical_zombie>

~~~
manicbovine
Correct, he argues that the formulation is incoherent. That is, certain parts
of our physical makeup give rise to experience, and that we cannot entertain a
coherent world containing minds that lacks subjective, conscious experience
while retaining the other functional correlates of consciousness.

This is exactly what I meant by 'delusion'... that, according to Dennett,
there are no "qualia", nothing above and beyond the ordinary
physicalist/reductionist (and scientific) account of experience.

It's surprising from a personal view because experience seems so essential and
real.

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raldi
Could the title be edited so that it doesn't sound like an obituary?

