this post was submitted on 12 May 2023
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philosophy
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Other philosophy communities have only interpreted the world in various ways. The point, however, is to change it. [ x ]
"I thunk it so I dunk it." - Descartes
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A copy of you would be like a biological sibling. Same genes but not you because of slightly or largely different experiences
The way dualists explain it is what if there was a magical copy of you that also can't think. It would go about its existence behaving like you through contrivance, but since it can't think, it's actually just a biological coincidence of random molecules appearing to be you and acting like you.
This is supposed to disprove the materialist conception of consciousness, because the claim is that if materialism were true, there would be no distinction between you and a coincidental copy that's exactly like you except for your mental states
I mean the only relevant critique is the Hard Problem of Consciousness , which doesn't really contradict materialism as such, just its crudest forms (i.e. feelings of love are just chemicals in the brain durrr hurrrr)
From the SEP
This seems more sensible if I'm reading it right. It's saying that "hard science" types of things about consciousness are simple to explain because they have a source, like neurons and parts of the brain. But more difficult would be the more ephemeral parts of what consciousness is like from the point of view of a conscious person? Or am I confused
That's exactly how I understand it. We can get the "scientific" explanation of how visual stimuli arrive at the brain. But the question of how visual stimuli are perceived and felt - what it means to see a flower in a phenomenal sense rather than a scientific sense - is far harder to "prove" or ground in a material conception of consciousness. Basically, how does my feeling of hunger come about from the stimuli that are causing hunger (which are material and scientific)
this line of questions actually tickles my interest and I'm gonna look into it more
:stalin-feels-good:
I'll admit my reading might be wrong btw. The way I see it tho is that it's really the question of how the scientific neural stimuli we understand as key to our experience of the world become "consciousness" as we understand it - and there's no clear answer to it.
Granted I'm very influenced by people like Andy Clark and the idea of "extended mind" (i.e. our minds aren't merely the meat in our brains), so I'm a bit ideosyncratic
I feel like a thought experiment that begins from the premise that physical systems don't actually work or do anything so through random chance a pile of dead wood with no actual biomechanical systems could produce an ongoing perfect mimicry of a person is basically just saying "oh yeah, but what if there was literal magic and physics didn't actually do anything, what about that huh? What if we're just squishy meat ghosts instead, and logs can walk and talk if imagine at them hard enough?"
One can arrive at any conclusion one desires by just presupposing a world where a hand picked set of rules are true (that's what neoclassical economists do, for example) but that doesn't make those imagined rules true or in any way support their conclusion. Like yes, if magic were real and you could separate out the core of someone's being and allow it to exist and operate independent of their flesh, then you would be existing in a world where you could do that, but seeing as you cannot the only reasonable conclusion is that the condition of "literal magic" is not present.
You're saying it perfectly. I don't know why I'm offering even a little respect to these premises they came up with. I was told they were the best things dualists have, and they are just magical fantasy scenarios. And yet philosophers like David Chalmers and John Searle are considered geniuses in their field. How do these people have careers if their entire philosophy boils down to belief in literal otherworldly magic?