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Re:Toward a Mature Science of Consciousness by cscurmudgeon on Tuesday June 26, 2018 @02:07PM (#17402785)
Dennet's reasoning is essentially: "I can't see or don't know anything beyond this line, so therefore nothing can exist beyond this line."

While attractive, it is not logically valid

Re:Toward a Mature Science of Consciousness by naasking on Tuesday June 26, 2018 @02:22PM (#17402894)
I think it's more like, "there is no reason to suppose there is anything beyond this line because everything can be explained without crossing it", which is logically valid.
Re:Toward a Mature Science of Consciousness by sgt101 on Tuesday June 26, 2018 @03:27PM (#17403358)
If I were to adopt this approach I would be dishonest - because every second of which I am aware shows me that there is something beyond the line.

DD may be different...

Re:Toward a Mature Science of Consciousness by naasking on Tuesday June 26, 2018 @04:01PM (#17403567)
Or it shows you something which you erroneously conclude falls beyond that line.
Re:Toward a Mature Science of Consciousness by sgt101 on Tuesday June 26, 2018 @04:50PM (#17403877)
It's about honesty - intellectual honesty. You / I can be mistaken, if it's an honest mistake then you/I will never know. Erroneously or not - the basic is that this is what you believe.
Re:Toward a Mature Science of Consciousness by cscurmudgeon on Tuesday June 26, 2018 @04:26PM (#17403717)
That is not what DD is claiming though. It is more along the lines of: "If X exists it is beyond this line. I can't explain anything beyond the line, so X is an illusion." That is what DD claims.

Maybe DD is a true zombie.

Re:Toward a Mature Science of Consciousness by naasking on Tuesday June 26, 2018 @05:12PM (#17404033)
I disagree with your paraphrase. Why not cite a specific quote or passage from Dennett where he makes such a ridiculous claim.
Re:Toward a Mature Science of Consciousness by cscurmudgeon on Wednesday June 27, 2018 @12:54AM (#17405856)
"makes such a ridiculous claim"

https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/materialism-eliminative/

In another well-known article, “Quining Qualia” (1988), Dennett challenges not just our conception of pain, but all of our different notions of qualitative states. His argument focuses on the apparently essential features of qualia, including their inherent subjectivity and their private nature. Dennett discusses several cases—both actual and imaginary—to expose ways in which these ordinary intuitions about qualia pull apart. In so doing, Dennett suggests our qualia concepts are fundamentally confused and fail to correspond with the actual inner workings of our cognitive system.

X (qualia, what we don't know) does not correspond to Y (cognition, what we understand), so X does not exist.

Yes. It is this ridiculous. :)

Re:Toward a Mature Science of Consciousness by naasking on Wednesday June 27, 2018 @10:24AM (#17408349)
Yeah, that's still incorrect. We have no reason to suppose X because Y can explain X as an illusion.

It's the exact same process that happens in every other science: you don't expand your axiomatic basis unless you have to.

Re:Toward a Mature Science of Consciousness by cscurmudgeon on Thursday June 28, 2018 @12:53AM (#17414167)
> Yeah, that's still incorrect.

Saying it does not make it so.

> We have no reason to suppose X because Y can explain X as an illusion.

But Y does not really explain X. That is core point. Saying Y explains X is just igoring the question. It is just Dennett claiming "Y explains X" with a flawed argument.

> It's the exact same process that happens in every other science: you don't expand your axiomatic basis unless you have to.

Btw, when talking about axioms, there are rigid formalized versions of physics and math (look up Mizar). Unless Dennet proves his claims with a formal theorem with rigidly defined axioms, I am not buying his arguments. Too much fluff in philosophy when dealing with important problems.

Just the word "illusion" can have n different definitions and maybe the illusion itself is an illusion :D

Re:Toward a Mature Science of Consciousness by naasking on Thursday June 28, 2018 @03:37PM (#17419830)
> But Y does not really explain X. That is core point. Saying Y explains X is just igoring the question. It is just Dennett claiming "Y explains X" with a flawed argument.

We have no reason to believe that Y cannot explain X, and ample reason to believe it can. Every previous circumstance of special pleading of this sort has eventually fallen to scientific inquiry.

Furthermore, various observations and theorems in physics, like the conservation of energy and the Bekenstein Bound, suggest strongly that the mind is a fully encapsulated, bounded physical system.

The only way to escape this inevitability is to posit that consciousness is some extra-physical quantity that has no impact on physical matter whatsoever. And what problem does adding this to our axiomatic basis solve exactly? None that I can see except yet another instance of special pleading.

If anything, such a step actually introduces more problems, because how would you explain the fact that we, beings of physical matter, are talking about consciousness if consciousness cannot influence matter?

Re:Toward a Mature Science of Consciousness by danharaj on Tuesday June 26, 2018 @02:55PM (#17403150)
There are for sure things of this world that are not explicable, even in principle.
Re:Toward a Mature Science of Consciousness by naasking on Tuesday June 26, 2018 @03:59PM (#17403558)
Such as?
Re:Toward a Mature Science of Consciousness by taurine on Tuesday June 26, 2018 @06:22PM (#17404431)
"The line we placed there was arbitrary. The division it creates is the very cause of the problems of consciousness. Science experiments show that it is likely at the wrong location, no matter how confident we were when we drew it. I will attempt to solve these artificial problems of consciousness by showing that it is a miscategorization and not-well-justified to draw the line in the first place."