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Comment by tgflynn | Hacker News Reader

> What's problematic about the "say no to consciousness" case?

It denies the most fundamental fact of human experience, the existence of that experience itself.

There are problems with our experience of experience. We think consciousness is continuous, but it can be clearly demonstrated that it's fragmentary. Daniel Dennett demonstrates this using alternating images in his TED talks. However, just because our experience of experience doesn't have 100% fidelity, it doesn't follow that our experience doesn't exist. That would be like saying our vision doesn't exist because it doesn't have 100% fidelity. I think Daniel Dennett and many other consciousness deniers make this mistake.

https://www.ted.com/talks/dan_dennett_on_our_consciousness?l...

It means is that our experience isn't what we think it is, but if the discrepancy is large enough, that's more or less the same thing as saying it doesn't exist.

Basically, if none of the aspects of consciousness that make it important or special in our eyes turn out to be true, I think that denying its existence is actually a less misleading way to correct the record than trying to completely change our intuitive understanding of whatever it is we actually have.

Our vision isn't what we think it is, with some quite large discrepancies, but it's still completely nuts to say it doesn't exist!

We can't deny "vision exists". But we can say that vision doesn't work anything like people think it works. (Everyone has a mental model of a camera or webcam.)

Your eye is really more like a flashlight in the dark. And it interprets things way to much (see optical illusions.)

It's easy to dismiss these problems, because you are rarely are in situations where the difference matters. This is no coincidence, since people rarely construct things that our eyes can't process. For example, fluorescent lights are actually turning ON and OFF constantly, but we just happen to not be able to see that. There really is no color purple, we just think it exists.

But it's quite easy to mess people up. See "rotating tunnel illusion", or the experiment where subjects fail to notice they are now giving directions to a different person, or the experiment where people fail to notice a guy in a gorilla suit (!) when given a simple task.

So the upshot is "vision is nothing like you think it is". Maybe we should have different words for the way a computers see things (a lot more reality based) vs the way humans see things (with all their foibles.) Ditto for Consciousness.

If our experience itself isn't what we think it is, that would tend to undermine empiricism itself, because we rely on our senses to inform us about the natural world. This includes our sense of whether or not others agree with us, whether they have the same experiences as us, etc.

I think therefore...Answer is Hazy. Ask again later.

I think elimitavists like Dennett don't deny that things go on, just that consciousness, in he form of this magical thing, doesn't exist. The demonstration of that being that many of the things people believe about consciousness that make it so magical and hard to explain simply aren't true. People are often mistaken about their own consciousness, so perhaps the remarkable mysterious thing that we can't explain doesn't exist. Instead there could be something much simpler and explainable, much in the mold of explanations that Dennett gives. The catch being that many people simply claim that the thing that Dennett can explain isn't consciousness because it doesn't do the magical things they think consciousness does.

But he puts it like this: "Consciousness is an illusion." I guess he's just clickbaiting us. What you're saying is that he actually means is: "Our culturally inherited notion of consciousness is incomplete and in some ways misguided." Well of course. You can say that for physics and various sciences.

Yes, his 'Consciousness is an Illusion' in clickbait is a sense. Mostly he is trying draw attention to the fact that the thing he is trying to explain is not the thing other people are saying is unexplainable. The commonly accepted notion of what consciousness is ... he doesn't believe that exists. But that's just because he thinks we are deluding ourselves about what we are actually experiencing as consciousness -- the thing we think about when we talk about consciousness? That's just an illusion, and the real workings are just mundane, and you'll just say "that's not really consciousness" if I explain them.

> It denies the most fundamental fact of human experience, the existence of that experience itself.

How does "saying no to consciousness" deny "the existence of the human experience"? If you were talking about brain denial, then I would have to agree. It seems fully possible for the brain to continue to do interesting things even if "consciousness" turns out to be false. Thankfully it's nonfalsifiable apparently....

Because "consciousness" and "subjective experience" are essentially two different words for the same thing.

Some people try to define "consciousness" as something other than "subjective experience" but doing so is really just evading the "hard question".

It's not clear to me what it would even mean for "consciousness to turn out to be false." The way consciousness is commonly defined (i.e. not with an analytical definition), its existence as a phenomenon can't be false - only our explanations for what it is and how it works.

It would be analogous to telling a physicist trying to provide an explanation for why objects fall to the ground that it might simply turn out to be false that objects fall to the ground at all. That doesn't make sense, because the exploration started with an observable phenomenon.

> It would be analogous to telling a physicist trying to provide an explanation for why objects fall to the ground that it might simply turn out to be false that objects fall to the ground at all.

It is false. Gravity is not about "ground" nor does it require that everything fall to the ground, indeed there seem to be forces on objects stronger than the force of gravity. The ability to falsify concepts is critically important in many branches of epistemology.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Falsifiability

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gravity

I think you missed the point you were replying to. That objects fall to the ground is an undeniable observation. Having conscious experiences falls into the same category. For that matter, we experience objects falling to the ground. Gravity is an explanation of our experiences of falling objects. The experience comes first, then the explanation. If there was no experience of falling, there would be no explanation of gravity.

I think he grasped the point. The trick here is reframing. Someone says "objects fall to the ground is an undeniable observation", and the other responds "No, your looking at it the wrong way; objects do something but you just think that's falling to the ground, in practice it's something else that has the appearance of falling to the ground". The responder isn't denying your observations, they are denying your interpretation of what you've seen.

The same applies to eliminitavists. They aren't denying that something happens that feels to you like experience, they are suggesting, however, that it may not be the thing that you think it is. They'll often point to people's own misunderstandings of their consciousness as examples that we can, in fact, actually be wrong about our own first person experiences. One example of this is the fact that we think we experience full field colour vision. In practice we have colour vision only in a narrow field in the center of our full visual field. You can perform experiments on yourself to demonstrate that this is in fact true. Another example is the sense of continuity to consciousness, which again, can be demonstrated to actually be false. If our "consciousness" is sufficiently different in reality from what we normally presume to be consciousness then, in some real sense, consciousness as we commonly think of it indeed doesn't exist. That doesn't mean there is nothing, just that calling it consciousness with all the associations that implies is perhaps sufficiently misleading as to be wrong.

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