Now that would be a good OP. Looking forward to not participating... — Banno
Dennett asks us to turn our backs on what is glaringly obvious—that in consciousness we are immediately aware of real subjective experiences of color, flavor, sound, touch, etc. that cannot be fully described in neural terms even though they have a neural cause (or perhaps have neural as well as experiential aspects). And he asks us to do this because the reality of such phenomena is incompatible with the scientific materialism that in his view sets the outer bounds of reality. He is, in Aristotle’s words, “maintaining a thesis at all costs.”
Dennett really does deny that the first-person nature of lived experience is real. — Wayfarer
What he says it is, is the consequence of billons of unconscious cellular interactions that give rise to the illusion of first-person consciousness, which is ultimately devoid of a — Wayfarer
Conscious experiences are real events occurring in the real time and space of the brain, and hence they are clockable and locatable within the appropriate limits of precision for real phenomena of their type
Dennett...assures us that “through the microscope of molecular biology, we get to witness the birth of agency, in the first macromolecules that have enough complexity to ‘do things.’ ... There is something alien and vaguely repellent about the quasi-agency we discover at this level — all that purposive hustle and bustle, and yet there’s nobody home.” Then, after describing a marvelous bit of highly organized and seemingly meaningful biological activity, he concludes:
Love it or hate it, phenomena like this exhibit the heart of the power of the Darwinian idea. An impersonal, unreflective, robotic, mindless little scrap of molecular machinery is the ultimate basis of all the agency, and hence meaning, and hence consciousness, in the universe.
I don't read this as denying consciousness so much as pointing out that it is post hoc. — Banno
The arguments within science are entirely over what the properties of that phenomena are. The argument in philosophy seems to be entirely over what constitutes an explanation. Which, as ever with philosophy, seems to be irresolveable. — Isaac
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