this post was submitted on 04 Sep 2023
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We know there are such things as conscious entities because we're conscious entities. We have no evidence that there exist such things as non-conscious entities, and Occam's razor says we shouldn't take their existence on faith.
Conscious realism is the subject of one single chapter out of a whole book of proofs that realism is false. Hoffman states in the book that he put the section on conscious realism at the end because he doesn't want people to over-focus on it. This is just a proposed model and he hasn't put a lot of study into fleshing it out and testing it, in comparison with his work disproving realism. He suggests conscious realism only because he knew that some people aren't going to buy a single thing he says if he can't present an alternative theory. His primary goal was to refute the existing theory. He's a cognitive scientist, not a philosopher. He just wanted to prove that brains don't represent truth, because that's cognitive science. He's not in the business of inventing worldviews, he's just in the business of one narrow corner of science.
Hoffman explored these questions as an answer to the hard problem of consciousness: how can neurons give rise to consciousness. Hoffman says they don't. It's the other way around.
I find unrealism valuable because it makes my chaos magic stronger and lets me do more to help trans people. I also think the revolution must be unreal in order to effect lasting change. Realism was used to justify cultural genocide of indigenous ways of thinking. That's crap and we should stop doing that.
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