Re:What Is It Like to Be a Bat? (1974) [pdf]
by CuriouslyC on Thursday March 30, 2017 @09:38PM
(#14000580)
A large part of the problem is that people don't all agree on the definition of consciousness. It ranges anywhere from the property of having an internal experience (which I subscribe to) all the way to self awareness, and even to the ability for rational thought.
This - and arguments over the definition of "is" - were the reason I stopped reading philosophy of mind papers.
Re:What Is It Like to Be a Bat? (1974) [pdf]
by ilugaslifg on Thursday March 30, 2017 @06:40PM
(#13999542)
Even having that argument in the first place is basically crypto-dualism.
The idea that there is objectively such a distinction is 100% reducible to any other attempt to assert that some definitional dichotomy "actually exists". It's exactly isomorphic to any other argument about taste. What is a sandwich, what is a car. An argument about whether a fetish is hot, between a person who has it and a person who doesn't. It's all the same damn thing.
Shit like that is why I hadn't stop taking philosophy courses in university. It was just rehashing what always came down to this exact same essentially platonist theory of forms bullshit, over and over and over.
Imagine a room full of philosophers and scientists arguing vociferously to determine where (or even if) to draw the line between conscious/unconscious organisms. (E.g., fish=probably, bacteria, probably not?)