Even if consciousness were an illusion, we act in many of the ways we do, and say many of the things we do, because we think of ourselves as being conscious, and the p-zombie could not have such a self-reflexive self-understanding. — Janus

Agreed. This is my problem with the p-zombie argument. But I listened to a recent podcast with Chalmers as the guest, and he doubled down on this. Yes, his zombie twin argues that he's conscious, and yes, there has to be some mechanistic explanation for why the p-zombie makes that argument. Which would also be the same mechanistic reason for us, which is where I jump off the p-zombie bandwagon.

I take it by the phrase "philosophical zombie", you mean a creature exactly like a human being in every physical detail, that behaves exactly like a conscious human being, but that somehow lacks sentience, or the phenomenal character of conscious experience, or something along these lines. Is that about right? — Cabbage Farmer

Yes, that's what saying consciousness is an illusion amounts to.

We can avoid talk of qualia and consciousness and still arrive at the same problem.

Which is how to account for our experience of colors, sounds, tastes, smells and feels characteristic of perception, memory, dreams, imagination in terms of the sciences. Dennett and Frankish think these experiences are illusions. We discriminate color, but we don't experience it. Color is a magic show.

Charmers is a naturalist also. He doesn’t think experience has a supernatural quality. For him, color, pain, etc. are not an illusion.

But I prefer Nagel's formulation because it gets at the heart of the objective/subjective split, which is that science removes the colors, feels, etc. to arrive at an abstracted, objective understanding of the world.

Qualia is first person, but I prefer to talk in terms of color, sound, etc.

We don’t have a description for sonar experiences, nor do we have a way of gaining them from science. That’s Nagels point.

Of course not, but that's what I think the logical conclusion is if you say colors, sounds, etc. are illusions, since that's how we know about apples and everything else.

Maybe you can formulate the p-zombie argument for epistemology?

Would those things that we don't experience thanks to the limitations of our sensory organs be considered subjective, too? In other words, are you saying that the information that is missing from our experience of the world is subjective and everything else is objective? — Harry Hindu

No, not unless panpsychism is true. The things we can't perceive that we learn about through science are described in objective terms.

Right, computers don't have neurological structures, and that's why we have little reason to seriously consider the possibility that they might experience anything in the kind of way that we think we and other animals do. — Janus

But they might perform the same functions that brain structures do one day. So then it's a question of whether functionalism or information processing is enough to generate/emerge/supervene experiences. Thus the question of mind-uploading and consciousness (Greg Egan's Permutation City, San Junipero Black Mirror Episode), or replacing your neurons one by one with a silicon version to see whether consciousness fades out or remains (A Chalmers favorite).

Does Nagel believe that what it is like to be a bat exhausts everything it is to be a bat including the non- nerological parts of the body that include the stomach, intestines, blood and feces? If not, then he's really not asking what it's like to be a bat. He's asking what it's like to be a specific part of the bat, no? — Harry Hindu

He's asking what the experience of using sonar is. Is it accompanied with something like color or sound? The reason for choosing a bat is because it has a sensory modality we lack. It's akin to being born blind and then learning that other people see color, whatever that means for a person blind from birth.

He is saying that our intuitive, unexamined folk theories of "conscious experience" should not be trusted and given a privileged status, simply because they are ours. — SophistiCat

Right, but then he uses this to argue like Keith Frankish that subjectivity is an illusion.

https://ase.tufts.edu/cogstud/dennett/papers/illusionism.pdf

Dennett's definition of consciousness is purely objective: functional, behavioral or neurophysiological with no additional experiential properties or stuff to go along with it. The colors, sounds, feels, are a trick of the brain.

This is where Chalmers and Dennett part company, but they understand each other's positions well. When you read or hear them debate each other's arguments, it's exactly on the point of whether subjectivity is real or an illusion.

I dont see how such things can be labeled as subjective. How are your imaginings, dreams and inner dialog subjective if I can refer to them with language and use them as explanations for your behavior that I percieve? — Harry Hindu

Because you can't experience my imagination, dreams, inner dialog and have to settle for language and behavior to know about them. And if I don't tell you, there will be experiences I have you won't ever know about, nor will you have any means of finding out, because they can't always be inferred from behavior.

It's not like we can hook someone's brain up to a machine and have it read out their thoughts or display their dreams on a tv.

This why Nagel asked what it's like to be a bat and used that as an example of how there is a gap between objective explanation and subjective experience.

Red and black are mental properties, or effects, that are about the ripeness of the apple, the light in the environment and the state of your visual system thanks to causation. Effects carry information about their causes. Illusions (or subjectivity) crop up when our minds don't interpret the causes correctly. — Harry Hindu

And how does this work with imagination, dreams, inner dialog? Subjective experience isn't exclusive to perception.

Isn't just obvious that Dennett is flogging a dead horse? — Wayfarer

Dennett isn't alone, though. I linked to Keith Frankish's article on Illusionism.

All the perception stuff Dennett shows in his videos is to show people can't be sure about their qualia and if they can't be sure about that then how can they commit to it being real. — Forgottenticket

This issue crops up with perception in general. The ancient skeptics loved to rub people's noses in all the ways perception can be mistaken. But Dennett and Frankish only want to endorse radical skepticism for introspection and subjectivity, not the external world. Dennett is a pragmatic realist when it comes to objectivity. But I think the sword cuts both ways, as a good skeptic would be sure to point out.

If they'd just realize that this is a mistake . . . — Terrapin Station

If it is a mistake, nobody has succeeded in showing how you can explain the subjective in terms of the objective, which is what the hard problem is about. See Nagel.

And it seems like people go, Dennett says consciousness is an illusion. He showed us some optical illusions. So he must be right." It makes no sense. — Terrapin Station

Dennett, like Chalmers, Searle, etc. thinks that consciousness can't be fit into a physicalist explanation of the world. But unlike them, he takes the position that this means consciousness must be an illusion, because why would consciousness be the one thing that's an exception in the universe?

I've read and heard enough of Dennett to be convinced that he thinks there is no consciousness and we are philosophical zombies. Except that he likes to keep using the word with a different definition. Which would be consciousness in the functional or behavioral sense only, because those can be fit into a materialist explanation.

What is meant by "real" may be debatable, but according to any ordinary definition colour is real and not merely a mental phenomenon, since some at least of the processes which give rise to colour as a phenomenon are physical — Janus

Sure, but what Illusionism is denying is our experience of color, which I think also undermines the warrant for believing in the processes which give rise to color as a phenomenon.

Seems like we agree on that.

This link is to a PDF of Dennet's review of Keith Frankish's survey of the Illusionist argument.

https://ase.tufts.edu/cogstud/dennett/papers/illusionism.pdf

He's a link to a 22 page PDF with Keith's argument. I haven't read this one yet as I'm a lot more familiar with what Dennett has had to say over the years, which was always along these lines.

https://nbviewer.jupyter.org/github/k0711/kf_articles/blob/master/Frankish_Illusionism%20as%20a%20theory%20of%20consciousness_eprint.pdf

If we're granting that we have the mental phenomenon of color (so that we can have an "illusion"), then we can't turn around and say that we don't have the mental phenomenon of color. — Terrapin Station

This is a good point, but I think they're using illusion in the sense of a magic trick which creates an experience of real magic that's actually smoke and mirrors where the audience is fooled because they can't think of how it's being pulled off. Similarly, our brains are tricking us into thinking we're having these experiences of color, smell, pain, etc.

As such, we're philosophical zombies according to the Illusionist. Even David Chalmers has referenced this argument on a recent podcast, saying that it's important and interesting because it provides an argument for the neurological mechanism that would cause his zombie twin in the zombie universe to argue for the hard problem!

To which the Illusionist would respond that the real world Chalmers is being fooled into thinking he's not in the philosophical zombie universe. I think the p-zombie argument is problematic, because of this, but I otherwise agree with Chalmers.

In a way, you could even say that the illusion theory is just pushing consciousness away one step. What then is experiencing the illusion? — Theologian

Frankish says that the Illusionist argument can't just be pushing the hard problem back one step, so what's being claimed is that the illusion is that we have an experience at all. It's a cognitive trick. Dennett and Frankish use the metaphor of a magic show with slight of hand being used to fool our brains.

It's even more basic than that. Colour is a real phenomenon by any account and not a merely "mental" phenomenon. — Janus

That's debatable and a minority position called color realism. Wavelengths of light and reflective surfaces are real. Whether either of those could be said to be colored in the way we experience color is controversial.

Compare this to feeling hot or cold, which relates to the amount of energy the particles in a volume of space has. Our experience of the energy can result in feeling cold or hot, but the space doesn't feel that way. Similarly, our experience of color relates to visible light reflecting off surfaces of objects.

Even granting color realism, it certainly wouldn't apply to all of our conscious sensations. Kicking a rock and feeling pain is a perceiver dependent experience, not a property of the rock.

our definition of 'carrying capacity' is according to 'species'. Are you saying that the hunter-gather is a different species than the agrian? Otherwise, as the same species the carrying capacity is the same. — Metaphysician Undercover

Nah, the carrying capacity changes as technology improves to support more of the same species (humans). A hunter-gatherer lifestyle would not support billions of people. We have billions of people now because modern civilization makes it possible. If the lights went out for good, our population would fall back to medieval times. (There's a fictional series of books that explores this.)

Future progress may further increase the carrying capacity of Earth for humans.

Because we know that it's impossible for houses to turn into flowers. — Michael

We don't know this, and it probably isn't impossible. We just aren't anywhere near that technologically advanced. But I doubt it's physically impossible.

Do you mean there is no non-technological way for houses to turn into flowers? My guess is it's merely highly improbably, but QM would allow for a non-zero possibility of such an arrangement coming about in an infinite universe or given enough time.

However, to Street's point, if we ever do get that technologically advanced, houses might become more like living things that can morph themselves into whatever suits the moment. In which case our conceptual understanding of houses and most of the world around us will have shifted into some highly technological symbiosis between the environment and ourselves.

Or we go extinct before then.

But the point being made is not about things: it is about concepts (or language). It's not about physical possibility. It's about conceptual possibility. And importantly, it is about how the one does not mirror or track the other (at least, not in any pre-established way - hence the bit about 'pre-established' harmony - an old theological notion). One way to put all this is that language is normative: we call things what we do not because (or not only because) of their 'physical properties' but also because of what we imagine things 'should' be: a 'house' is roughly what we call something to be lived in; — StreetlightX

But as at least one other poster has brought up with the magic example, we can conceptually understand houses being turned into flowers by some special means. And this sort of imaginative leap happens quite a bit in fiction, and not so infrequently in theology. Think of the Catholic Eucharist.

But let's say the language is meant to be everyday real-world and not magic or metaphysics. Is there anything physically preventing a house from being turned into flowers atom by atom, given some really unlikely scenario or with advanced technology?

Let's say time travelers or aliens leave a device behind that can rearrange matter however we like. Someone uses it to turn an abandoned decrepit building into flowers. Does this require us to alter our conceptual understanding of houses or flowers? Or does it just broaden our knowledge of what's physically possible?

Most of us have a sacred sense of life, where we conclude that almost any condition of life is worth living. — Josh Alfred

But is that because we have a biological imperative to survive? We can also say humans have a sacred duty to procreate and propagate the species. But again, is that just a biological imperative that we've turned into a sacred sense?

If you asked me would I rather be born into slavery my entire life or not exist, I would choose to not exist. And yet people were born and lived in slavery, and had children. And that's because the will to survive is very strong. And yes, we can say their lives had value, but it's not the sort of life we wish on anyone.

Who cares if you have to lie to someone threatening your kids? Is this something you're going to feel guilty about? No. Is it something society will judge you for? No. Will there be any legal ramifications. No. Will God deduct brownie points for getting into heaven because you lied under duress?

What good does it serve to always follow Kant's maxim anyway? You can say under ordinary circumstances it's best not to treat people as a means to an end. That's a nice ideal. But it's just that, an ideal that someone came up with.

Is the point that Kantian ethics are impossibly ideal? Probably. So is the golden rule and the ten commandments.

Are you being sarcastic? I’m not always quick on the uptake. — Noah Te Stroete

Sort of, but I was conceding your argument. For now.

I don’t understand. — Noah Te Stroete

In my mind, it seems like you proved your point. Horses are mental cats.

Oh wait, mixing things up with the OP.

You’ve convinced me. Now work on Terrapin Station. — Noah Te Stroete

Why does it feel like you won the point?

As if you can even speak of something extra-mental — Noah Te Stroete

Based on what you've been arguing, Terrapin cannot speak of himself extra-mentally.

But does he only perceive himself mentally?

LOL and we’ve arrived back to Terrapin Station. — Noah Te Stroete

Only the mental conception, though.

I would have to interrogate a physicalist to know for sure. — Noah Te Stroete

I'm pretty sure you can find a few on here. @Terrapin Station

I think so. — Noah Te Stroete

So physicalists fail to take that into account?

I suppose when I say that you can’t have one without the other, I mean that physicality is needed to give a venue for the mental, while the mental is needed to give meaning to the physical. — Noah Te Stroete

Does this mean that no physical theory can be complete because it will always fail to account for the mental component in deriving the physical theory?

That information is also a conceptual framework which requires minds. — Noah Te Stroete

Yes and no. Information can also be thought of as physical. The lightwaves bouncing off objects into photoreceptors is a physical exchange.

You would stop experiencing of course. There is “something” that caused your death, viz. matter. But that’s all we can say about it. “Highway”, “cars”, “traffic” are all mental representations of perception. — Noah Te Stroete

Problem with that is explaining how it is that I can predict your likely death if you cross without looking, if it's just something material that perception does not tell us about. More broadly, how is it that we can navigate the world, make technology and do science if our perception isn't somewhat accurate?

Unless you mean something else by that. I can agree that colors are not properties of things themselves, but our ability to experience color does give us information about those things.

You’re presupposing other minds observing your death. — Noah Te Stroete

Would it matter if nobody observed your death? You'd still stop experiencing.

That “thing” isn’t what’s being spoken of. — Noah Te Stroete

I don't see why not. If I tell you there's a busy highway there, and to look before crossing, you could reply that I'm not speaking of the extra-mental highway but a mental one. That doesn't change the fact that crossing without looking can get you killed, which would be an extra-mental state for you. Therefore, I must be referring to something extra-mental about the busy highway.

“The thing being experienced” presupposes a mind experiencing it. — Noah Te Stroete

Yes, but that doesn't mean the thing presupposes a mind experiencing it.

Well, that would all depend on your epistemological views, right?

I think I can speak of things extra-mental, even though my experience of them is mental. I think that's confusing the experience itself with the thing being experienced, or what the experience is about. Just like the word "rock" is different from specifying a rock that one kicks.

But that does bring up a frequent issue that philosophical debates often involve terms like perception and mental that people don't agree on.