/sci/ - Science & Math

>>9873435
>literally all of science, art and much of ethics hinges on the uses of experience/consciousness
That's the problem. Very old and deeply ingrained language is the hardest to have serious, well defined discussions about because the implicit assumptions they make have long since contaminated how everyone speaks / writes.
>the core concept of **phenomenal consciousness**
>this is as solid a distinction as it gets
>in one of them you intrinsically exist; on the other you are just a bunch of objects.
So three instances just in those couple of sentences alone where you're emphasizing how fundamental and irreducible this concept is.
That's exactly the problem.
You can't hope to have serious progress on topics like this if you're stuck on an assumption you've already hit bedrock and can reduce no further.
https://web.media.mit.edu/~minsky/eb9.html
>At the same time signals from the sensors in your ears, nose, and skin will travel along quite different paths, and all these streams of information may come to affect, in various ways, the descriptions the rest of your mind is using. So, because those pathways are so complex and indirect, when you try to tell someone about what sensation you feel, or what you are experiencing, you’ll be telling a story based on sixth-hand reports that use information that has gone through many kinds of transformations. So despite what some philosophers claim, we have no basis to insist that what we call our ‘sense of ‘experience’ is uniquely direct.
>The old idea that sensations are 'basic' may have been useful in its day, the way the four kinds of 'atoms' of antiquity were supposed to be elementary. But now we need to recognize that our perceptions are far less 'direct,’ because they are affected by what our other resources may want or expect. This might relate to the fact that we sometimes clearly’ see’ objects, which do not ‘really’ exist.