Facing Up to the Problems of Facing Up to the Problems of Consciousness

[Canute]

For me, rejecting Dennett's methodological stance becomes a question of intellectual integrity. --Gregg

Hooray. Enough beating around the bush. Dennett's book is intellectually dishonest and his arguments are easy to dismiss. His book is founded on unsupported assumptions, is full of patronising, offensive and feeble sideswipes at those who disagree with him, and is chock a block with the sort of 'sleights of hand' that Chalmer's complains are common in the literature on consciousness. It does not explain anything, but merely illustrates that hetero-phenomenology is not the way to explain consciousness.

" ince heterophenomenology is a way of interpreting behaviour (including the internal behaviour of brains, etc.), it will arrive at exactly the same heterophenomenological world for Zoe and for Zombie-Zoe, her unconscious twin." (95)

Here we have a clear statement asserting that hetero-phenomenology is not an explanation of consciousness, but rather of behaviour, and that it is therefore just as useful for explaining zombie behaviour as it is for explaining human behaviour. Thus is it made clear that heterophenomenology is not a theory of consciousness and does not acknowledge the existence of subjective experience. Retro-phrenomenology is what I'd rather call it.

Congratulations Gregg on writing a book that's very definitely in a different class to Dennett's.

 

[Philocrat]

The only significant 'Theoretical Framework' worthy of pursuing is that consciousness serves a Contributory Purpose to whatever system that it is installed in, otherwise it would be completely useless to that system. What role does consciousnes play in the human system than to contribute to the onverall 'KNOWLEDGE BASE' of the beholder? Consciousness has to be looked at in terms of its Purpose. What is it for? How much information does it contribute into the 'SURVIVAL BANK'?

The KNOWLEDGE BASE is all there is to life and the potential survival of such a life. The most important issue at stake here is:

HOW MUCH DOES CONSCIOUSNESS CONTRIBUTE INTO THE KNOWLDGE BASE?

Worst still, we don't even know whether the MEMORY in the human body is 'FIXED' or 'POOLED', let alone how much of it is enough. It would be very interesting to know how much 'LIFE-CRITICAL INFORMATION' consciousness puts in such a memory cumulatively. We need to quantify it. The wild horse called consciousness that we have let loose is heading in the wrong direction and is dangerously diverting all our intellectual resources away from the real issues:

1) How is the memory configured in the human material body? Is it a FIXED LOCATION MEMORY' or is it a POOLED MEMORY?

2) The Environment that every human being is physically installed is dynamic and danger-prone such that the only way to survive in such an environment is to be continuously aware of it and monitoring it. If this is true, how much memory do we need to gather and store life-critical information cumulatively towards knwoing in full all there is to know in order to permanently survive in such an environment?

3) What role does consciousness play in reliably mapping life-critical information onto the memory for the survival benefit of the beholder?

These are issues that are far more important than this self-serving talking shop about 'hard problem' of consciousness nonesense. Sooner or later we would have to turn our attention to these issues, the most important being how to re-engineer the entire human system to work better!

 

[Canute]

What you say is that consciousness is causal. You're going to have a hard job convincing a physicalist of that. You have missed the fact that neo-Darwinism gives consciousness no role at all in the evolution of species.

You say that C is critical to survival in a threatening environment. Perhaps. But if so then presumably nematodes are conscious, and you'll also have a job persuading many people of that. But you are right that consciousness is important to knowledge. Without it there wouldn't be any such thing as knowledge.

If you think we could re-engineer human beings to "work better" than many millions of years of happy accidents could manage then you're a optimist big time, and have seriously misunderstood the hard problem.

 

[Philocrat]

What you say is that consciousness is causal. You're going to have a hard job convincing a physicalist of that. You have missed the fact that neo-Darwinism gives consciousness no role at all in the evolution of species.

You say that C is critical to survival in a threatening environment. Perhaps. But if so then presumably nematodes are conscious, and you'll also have a job persuading many people of that. But you are right that consciousness is important to knowledge. Without it there wouldn't be any such thing as knowledge.

If you think we could re-engineer human beings to "work better" than many millions of years of happy accidents could manage then you're a optimist big time, and have seriously misunderstood the hard problem.

Yes, let Nature or Creator fix it! so they always say. Well, let us all cross our legs and wait then. At least this is also an option, and as I have consistently argued elsewhere, no one has any right to deny us this option.

 

[Canute]

Fix what? Wait for what?