/lit/ - Literature

>>23135798
It means it’s an illusion

>>23135798
Whereas niggas who argue for qualia just say it's real because it is (muh intuition)?
https://www.jstor.org/stable/2960077

>>23135798
It seems like they could only be taken seriously as scientists and not philosophers. We do hallucinate things all the time and fill in gaps but we’re still conscious of those things. We have illusions but consciousness itself is not an illusion. It really is bizarre how these people get away with such nonsense

>>23135798
This nigga would claim ideologies aren’t real because you can’t touch them. The Max Stirner of philosophy of mind.

>>23135798
Why don't you go read a real book?

>>23135798
>>23135806

they are pretending that science has solved the mystery of consciousness when it's not even close to achieving that.

>>23135798
maybe try reading books instead of just going on the internet to meme about le materialist npcs

You could have just read the book, Dennett spells it out pretty clearly. Or, you could have just checked warosu. I'll post a few screencaps of people who actually read the book.

>>23135798
It's what the Hindus and Buddhists knew a long time ago. The "I" is a construct of the mind, made discernible and communicable because we have the desire to make it as such. A conscious "I" is a useful invention.

>>23135993
>>23136002
>>23136009
>>23136013
These four effortposts are just what I got from searching "dennett illusion" in warosu and looking for any posts that actually explain what Dennett believes instead of just doing the reddit bit about zombies or whatever. If you want more you can do the same. Feel free to look the posts up and follow the reply chains, they elaborate on this to dumbos that didn't read the book (one of them even posts the paragraph where Dennett directly refutes and laughs at retards that he knows will be too low IQ to understand the argument that he's making because it involves multiple agents acting together).

>>23135798
The title is misleading.
He calls a book "Consciousness explained" and then explains that consciousness is not a thing but a process.
"No shit Sherlock!"
More like "Some misconceptions about consciousness explained, not the actual consciousness".

>>23136002
> Dennet doesn't believe that consciousness is an illusion, he believes that the idea of a single unified "you", a mental homunculus that's piloting your body from inside your brain and is the thing that's actually experiencing mental phenomena, is an illusion.
I think he makes a strawman argument here. Nobody said that there is a homunculus inside the brain, nobody believes that. But if you understand it figuratively, as a metaphor, then what does he mean? Is the actual person, the actual human being, the actual body as it is perceived by the "owner" of that body - is that an illusion and doesn't actually exist? Because when you sit on a chair in a room, you don't actually sit on a chair in a room, it's the model of your body that is created by your brain that sits on the model of the chair inside the model of the room. So he's calling that model a homunculus and claims that it doesn't exist?
If so, then it sounds like he doesn't understand the implications of his own argument.

>>23136036
https://www.academia.edu/37649217/Dunking_Dennett

>“The idea that there is something like a ‘phenomenal field’ of ‘phenomenal properties’ in addition to the informational/functional properties accommodated by my theory” of consciousness, Dennett writes, “is shown to be a multi-faceted illusion, an artifact of bad theorizing” (1993a: 891). Here he is clear about what he doesn’t mean by ‘consciousness’: consciousness is nothing over and above the possession of certain “informational/functional properties”. Zombies are by definition creatures that have all the informational/functional properties that we do. That is how they can be and are behaviourally indistinguishable from us. They are therefore conscious, on Dennett’s terms, in every sense that we are —although “there is nothing it is like to be a zombie”.

>Replying to Frank Jackson in 1993, Dennett is unequivocal: “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’”

>This is why Dennett can say that “of course, consciousness exists”. It’s just that the consciousness he claims to exist isn’t consciousness—actual consciousness. It’s looking-glassed consciousness, zombie consciousness, consciousness of the sort that a creature has when it is “behaviorally indistinguishable from a normal human being, but is not conscious” (1991: 405)—not conscious in the standard sense of the term.

>Dennett summarized his position in an interview in The New York Times in 2013: “The elusive subjective conscious experience —the redness of red, the painfulness of pain— that philosophers call qualia? Sheer illusion” (2013c: C1). He repeated the point in a podcast the same year. We find in nature “any number of varieties of stupendous organization and sensitivity and discrimination …. The idea that, in addition to all of those, there’s this extra special something—subjectivity—what distinguishes us from the zombie—that’s an illusion” (Dennett, 2013b). He re-expressed the idea in a book also published in that year:

> When I squint just right, it does sort of seem that consciousness must be something in addition to all the things it does for us and to us, some special private glow or here-I-amness that would be absent in any robot …. But I’ve learned not to credit the hunch. I think it is a flat-out mistake, a failure of imagination (Dennett, 2013a: 285).

>>23136252
What? So he actually claims that consciousness is an illusion and it's not actually there?
Maybe it's the Mandela effect: we're dealing with two versions of Daniel Dennet, one of them claims that everything is an illusion (the homunculus doesn't exist, and that non-existent homunculus is you), the other one claims that consciousness is an illusion and it's not actually there.

>>23136002
>
>Dawkins is the most important biologist of the 20th century
wait, really?

>>23136402
I read kammerer and it seems that's literally what he's saying as well. Essentially we are p-zombies, there is NOTHING it is like to be us.

Which, I mean, I mean that's just retarded I am obviously conscious who would even deny this? So I keep thinking they must mean something different right?

>>23136862
One of the hardest laughs in my life was from a post about Dennet.

Anon asked that maybe we should consider seriously the possibility that he's really a p-zombie.
If a guy makes his whole career claiming that he's unconscious, maybe we should at least consider it to be the case.

I've read the post and then suddenly I burst out laughing so hard. After some time I calmed down. And then after a minute or so I remembered the post and started laughing again. I think if somebody saw me then he would've thought I'm crazy: someone is sitting and then starts laughing hard.

One of the funniest jokes ever.

>>23136901
>One of the funniest jokes ever.
I mean, it wasn't even intended as a joke, it was a serious post, or maybe half-serious.

Why does every discussion of illusionism trigger total cognitive shutdown in its opponents? It's like they lose the ability to understand the language they converse in when someone tries to articulate the position. The screen caps and quotations are crystal clear.

>>23135798
btfo'd by Kastrup

>>23135798
The reluctant horseman

>>23135993
>>23136002
>>23136009
>>23136013
This is being extremely and unnecessarily charitable to Dennet.

He certainly, even if how somehow actually has those particular views, has not expressed them in such a sensible and coherent way. You are clearly reading your own interpretations of Dennet into Dennet, rather than actually taking what he says seriously, and then acting like your charity is simply a more honest assessment of what was said.

Dennet has not solved the mind-body, and that he seems to think he has is a serious flaw in his thinking. Eliezer Yudkowsky does a much better job of expressing the "kernels of good philosophy" in Dennet's work, and his take on P-Zombie arguments is the best I've seen. He's a much better philosopher than Dennet is, though Dennet is the better researcher.

>>23135798
BTFO by Chalmers

>>23135798
It means they literally aren't sentient.

>>23135798
Brian Tomasik is another illusionist. Here's what he wrote about it:

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

>The mantra of the more radical version of eliminativism is that we're not conscious but only think we are. How is that possible? "I just know I'm conscious!" But any thoughts you have about your being conscious are fallible. I believe there are bugs in the vast network of computation that produces thoughts like "I'm conscious in a way that generates a hard problem of consciousness." No thought you have is guaranteed to be free from bugs, and it seems more likely -- given the basically useless additional complexity of postulating a metaphysically privileged thing called consciousness -- to suppose that our attribution of metaphysically privileged consciousness to ourselves is a bug in our cognitive architectures. This is a relatively simple way to escape the whole consciousness conundrum. If it feels weird, that's because the bug in your neural wiring is causing you to reject the idea. Your thoughts exist within the system and can't get outside of it.

>Your brain is like a cult leader, and you are its follower. If your brain tells you it's conscious, you believe it. If your brain says there's a special "what-it's-like-ness" to experience beyond mechanical processes, you believe it. You take your cult leader's claims at face value because you can't get outside the cult and see things from any other perspective. Any judgments you make are always subject to revision by the cult leader before being broadcast. (Similar analogies help explain the feeling of time's flow, the feeling of free will, etc.)

>>23138523
I swore to myself today I would not read anything apocalyptically retarded before lunch and you have made me a liar

People like Dennet who claim that consciousness is an "illusion" (whatever that is supposed to mean) and swear up and down that qualia literally don't exist must have some extreme form of aphantasia to the degree that they can't even observe themselves having experiences. The interesting thing, though, is that just having language installed in their brain gives them enough rationality to introspect on their condition, but their introspection is exclusively propositional. They have no access to perspectival "what-it's-like-ness" and so they come to a conclusion as absurd as "consciousness doesn't exist".

They're a weird kind of of pseudo-zombie not in the sense that they aren't conscious, but that they can never really understand that they are conscious.

>>23135886
/thread
these books are esoteric nonsense

>>23135993
The computer analogy is from Donald Hoffman. However, he comes to opposite conclusions, following an argument similar to Plantinga's, that natural selection leaves us with no good reason to think our beliefs about the world "correspond" to some sort of mindless externally "out there." And, since the appearance/reality distinction is incoherent if all that is ever known or experienced is "appearance," this means we should opt for some sort of objective idealism.

To me, eliminitivism reeks of the sort of hubris that was so widespread early in the 20th century where essentially any area of inquiry where a solution couldn't be found was deemed a "pseudo-problem" or meaningless. Through this process, morality, truth, the meaning of words, and even conciousness itself were all proclaimed illusory. It's a sort of sophistry in a way, declaring that reason simply cannot be used to deal with whole swaths of reality, and it opened the door to post-modernism and the reduction of philosophy — the love of wisdom — to politics, power, gender, race, etc.

If you stick with Plato and the ancients there is no reason for this because reason is itself transcendent, ecstatic. But somehow Western civilization found itself throwing out 2,000 years of thought and going back to the pre-Socratics in declaring radical skepticism, claiming we were all stuck inside the box of ideas, or else the box of language. These ideas aren't new or a result of the revelations of science as people want to claim. They are very old, bad ideas, resurrected.

>>23139196
They aren't even that. They are just autistic who need to "solve" conciousness. It happens all the time in philosophy. Go back and look at the history of logical positivism. You had people trying to say the real meaning of words is "the conditions under which the proposition expressed by them is true," as if Dante can be reduced to true/false distinctions. Faced with problems, they didn't abandon their theory, but decided most human talk was "meaningless." Likewise, others decided that meaning was just "use," and that words didn't actually mean anything to us, but were just sounds for signaling behaviors we wanted from others.

Go further back and you have Parmenides denying that motion occurs because he couldn't fathom how Greek grammar would require that change meant being comes from non-being .

>>23135798
all atheists are counter reformation agents

>>23136013
>just a materialist form of panpsychism.
Sums it up.
I don't think I care because I can read Advaita Vedanta or Tantric Buddhist cosmology and more or less conclude a similar philosophy.
Dennett is really there to handhold Atheist's brains because their metaphysical muscle has atrophied.

"There Is No Spoon"

>>23142016
Imagine having such a high ego that you actually think that. What the fuck. These guys are deranged.

>>23138523
>The mantra of the more radical version of eliminativism is that we're not conscious but only think we are. How is that possible? "I just know I'm conscious!" But any thoughts you have about your being conscious are fallible.
If I'm understanding this correctly, this guy is saying that we aren't conscious but think we are? If you can think, doesn't that presuppose consciousness?
>Your brain is like a cult leader, and you are its follower. If your brain tells you it's conscious, you believe it.
How can there be a 'you' to trick if 'you' aren't conscious? What is this 'you' entity if it isn't consciousness?

>>23135798
They are saying that you don’t see or hear things, and you don’t feel pain.
You think you do, but you don’t.
That is their actual position.

>you think you're conscious but you're not
>you think you're experiencing things but you're not
They've got it all wrong: thinking is not taking place, just the illusion of thought cast upon a passive awareness.

>>23141875
>I can read Advaita Vedanta or Tantric Buddhist cosmology
IMO the only kind of Tantric view that comes remotely close to Dennett is the Gelug view, but most of the Tibetan schools and Advaita generally agree that consciousness exists in a manner that is self-evident and obvious.

Don't let this thread die retards, I'll be back in 9 hrs after sleep.