Something an acquaintance in the old Atari users group I was a part of in the 80s/90s said to me (when I was a teenager, saying "acid could be neat to try") stuck with me.
"You know how if you drop some screws or something on video circuitry of the PCB of your computer and the display gets all scrambled? That's analogous to what LSD is doing to your brain."
The patterns displayed across the TV after doing that might be really cool. But it's a profound mistake to assume meaning in them. In fact it'd be very difficult to work backwards from what's on the screen to how the video circuitry works.
It's like solipsism taken one step further, no I'm not the only thing that exists because -I- don't really exist in any meaningful way either.
We're all just P-zombies.
Qualia is nonsense
If you thought relating to normal people as a nihilist was hard.....
As best I understand it, our "consciousness" that "feels" things is basically an overblown condition monitoring system bolted onto the top of a highly effective correlation/prediction engine attached to a whole lot of sensory nerves. Sure, a signal goes from the senses into the middle bit and the result feeds into the consciousness bit which cross-checks everything including its own responses, but that's a control system, not a 'soul'. Or conversely, you could say the spectrum of "error term is saturated negative" through to "error term is saturated positive" is a range of qualia "felt" by a PID loop.
Exactly, it's kind of like how the debate about "free will" is being handled, either you use a definition of free will that makes it trivially true, but useless, or you use a definition of free will that requires you to literally believe in magic
Ever been tired and run on autopilot? Our experience of ourselves vary in strength all the time. If I'm really really honest with myself, I don't actually have the experience of qualia all the time
The more I read on cognitive science (Strange Loop was the first and then you understand what was behind GEB) the more I concur with your view. It is depressing though.
For short term daily tasks, one can depend on routines.
For longer planning the implications are horrifying if there is no qualia in the sense that we think of it.
It's just like with nihilism, it might be "true" but it is not very productive.
At best it leads to Vito Corleone type of ethics, ie tribalism, I'll take care of my family/village, but woe to the outside world.
At worst it leads to Michael Corleone actions, ie screw everyone besides yourself.
Where do you get joy in life if Dennett turns out to be right?
As far as medium term motivation, guilt, fear and debt seems to work for most people regardless of philosophical disposition.
That's is what you say, but how can we know that you are not a conscious being imitating a p-zombie? ;-)
So I'm going for the one that requires the least magic
And music... It takes a whole other dimension. Calling it `high def` doesn't do it any justice. Experiencing music aside, it feels as though you live the music you are hearing. It is hard to explain. It also becomes your reality.
Wow awesome insight! Thanks for sharing your experience, this blows my mind. I might be able to try it now without fear of other worldly entity bad trip encounters.
While experiencing a trip, are you able to recall that you took a substance and that this is your altered reality? Can you close your eyes and see darkness? Can you take a benzo to abort trip like shrooms?
What I didn't expect was that the effects wouldn't just "feel real" or "be convincing", they were real. Subjectively, it wasn't inside my head, it was the actual world that changed. The fact that a small amount of psychoactive substance could fundamentally alter my perceived reality put the final nail in the coffin for any possibility that my mind was generated by something outside my own skull.