With all due respect, Sub, and with apologies to unter if I've ever misspoken by defending him:
Don't worry yourself, I judge as I find and you are just fine by me. Here's a proper answer.
The strictly materialist approach to consciousness will never cease to baffle me.
What on earth has given you the idea that I am a strict materialist? I'm not. I certainly am a monist, in that I think that there is only one sort of stuff: matter. I certainly believe that everything supervenes on matter, but I don't
for a moment think that supervenience implies that, in the conceptual domain, logic follows the same rules as physics. I've argued, with explicit demonstrations of it not doing so that it does not.
My position is a variation of Anomalous Monism as championed by Donald Davidson and refined by Jaegwon Kim. I then, in theory if not in practice, champion a sharp divide between the conceptual and the non conceptual aspects of mind. There's the stuff that goes on in language: logic, intentions, folk psychology, narrative and so on. Then there's stuff that is non conceptual and smeared all over the brain. Here I take a different position which is a more straightforward property dualism: in some areas of the brain, and in some circumstances, physical events are also mental events. They are the same thing seen from two perspectives. To use the old saw c-fibres firing is pain. One is a physical and the other a mental description of the same event. Here, I'm leaning on Rudder Baker's constitution accounts.
Descartes may have 'settled' the issue with his substance dualism, but now that we don't need God to underpin our ontology and substance dualism has been systematically proven profoundly unhelpful whenever it turns up, it flabbergasts me that the parsimonious explanation of property dualism isn't more widely accepted in philosophy and science. If it were then most of the (non) problems simply evaporate.
IF we (meaning us collectively, not in the royal sense) are our brains, then WTF is this "illusion" of consciousness being presented to?????
Ask the wrong question and the world will cheerfully offer up the wrong answer. Information hits the brain from a wide range of sources and has to be bound to be much use. One fundamental problem the embodied brain has to solve is how to unify all of the perceptions in a way that actually allows the embodied brain to act effectively in the world.
In the brain, there is no place where it all comes together, there is no finish line at which afferent becomes efferent and there is no self. What there is, and Chalmers, who I will talk about later, is the easy problem of consciousness: we measure, discriminate, respond and act, for a start. My personal experience, and by methodologically unscientific but entirely pragmatic assumption, is that all of this happens to feel like something to everyone who isn't me.
So let's start with a P-zombie. As it happens, I don't believe human P-zombies are possible because I think functionalism is bollocks and conscious cognition takes both the meat and the motion. However, if we imagine a p-zombie, then that zombie, which you seem happy to imagine, has somehow magically solved the problem of binding all the disparate aspects of its internal and external sensory manifest - that's the hard bit of the easy problem.
More than that, it's somehow developed the ability to talk about a sense of self it doesn't have. Me, I think it would only be able to think of itself in the third person and this would be a bit of a giveaway as it would only be able to respond to its behaviour. A zombie trying to be devious would, presumably, have to whisper, very quietly and hear itself... However, it would be able to apply the intentional stance to the body it was, name it, decide what beliefs and desires that it had and, not just use them for prediction and explanation, but also, cleverly, to work out what to do next, allowing it to use logic to make both tactical and strategic decisions. It would get interests.
In time, with practice, it might come to build up a bloody great set of settled beliefs and desires. In time, it could start to look a lot like it had a first person perspective. Hell, it could even mistake that cluster of beliefs desires, folk psychological predictions, experience about the body's dispositions and so on for something more. Now imagine a Watsonian P-zombie. It's internalised that language use and predicts silently, with the brain clamping down on the muscular production of language and simply producing, then interpreting language. That's broadly what we do when thinking in words, by the way. However, again, it's a P-zombie, its behaviour is on an internal feedback loop rather than an external one, but it still doesn't feel like anything. It's got a rich model of what it does that it can use to predict, explain, justify and produce behaviour and it's perfectly capable of modelling others - as if they had intentions desires and interests.
Obviously, this embodied p-zombie brain doesn't really have beliefs and it isn't really there. But it uses the intentional stance to predict and explain behaviour. it will be able to tell stories based on personal history and, living among non zombies, would learn the grammatically correct use of personal pronouns like I. The I, as Dennett puts it, would be the centre of narrative gravity. A convenient hook for the stories. A fictional character written by the p-zombie. Mind you, it would be a fictional character able to respond to its own stories and history. That's starting to feel like a pretty rich (non) mental life.
Now, holding that story in your head, just imagine what would happen if, actually, the unification of all of the perceptions in a way that actually allows the embodied brain to act effectively in the world. happened to feel like something to have. Imagine if, before language happened, pain hurt just because sharing information in a rich manner across a brain happened to feel like something. Now you have two options here: Chalmers' option is panpsychism - all matter has a phenomenal character in the same way it has mass. Personally I see Chalmers' option as incredibly excessive.
All you have to imagine is that, in the brain, some processes that promulgate and bind information across the brain just happen to feel like something when they happen. It doesn't have to be many, because as we saw with the zombie, even a zombie can get a third person sense of self. Most of our sense of self is, as it happens, third person, just like the zombie. However, a little bit of it isn't. It just happens that, in us, it turns us from p-zombies to something a bit richer, with a spark of internal awareness of solving the easy problems that easy consciousness solves. That internal dashboard, is all it takes. all it needs. Most of the heavy lifting is already done by third person folk psychology applied recursively.
So we have two user illusions - a really basic private one that is biology in action seen from the inside (because it feels like something to discriminate, perceive, nocicept and so on) and a public one that is rather similar to the zombie one that allows us to spin stories around this little kernel of biology experienced from the inside. Put the two together and you have something that looks mysterious from the biology (because of the language, intentional stuff and so one) and looks mysterious from the personal (because of the ill understood biology). Obviously, the two are hopelessly intermingled which just makes unpicking it near impossible. As I always say, psychology has not yet had its Newton.
I will repeat: the idea of a brain causing an illusion by itself, to whatever the heck it is the illusion is supposed to be useful for (if not the brain itself),
User illusions are often quite useful. ask any PLC!
is as illogical as the idea of God sacrificing Himself to Himself via His avatar, Jesus.
Only if you look at it the wrong way.
Don't just tell me "You just don't understand it." It needs to be explained coherently. It hasn't been. Not by Dennet,
I'd say Dennett explains it entirely coherently. However, to understand his argument really requires you to be up to speed on his theory of Content as well as his theory of consciousness.
Sam Harris, or anyone else.
I have no idea about Sam Harris, I don't think this is his area.
The hard problem remains, re Chalmers. And lest we go saying this is theological, remember, please, that Chalmers is an atheist.
Yeah, an atheist who believed (at the time) that consciousness was a fundamental property of all matter. Even if that wasn't the case, and it is, why does everyone speak approvingly of the hard problem while ignoring the easy one. Chalmers didn't, Newton like, realise that consciousness was hard in the early nineties, surprising everyone else who hadn't realised. He wrote a complex paper pimping panpsychism that no one has ever read but grab three words out of - it's the cogito all over again.
If we are just our brains, what exactly is the purpose of subjective experience, or qualia? The p-zombie would be just fine without having any subjective experience, like any other strictly functional machine.
I disagree, no one has ever given me a convincing reason for thinking that a p-zombie could exist.
Moreover: it would be FAR better off, what without all this needless suffering and pain!
Really? have you seen what happens to people who don't feel pain? I'd have a dig through the literature on that one.
I hope that's a detailed enough answer.
