News for hackers. Stuff that matters.
Re:Ludwig Wittgenstein: A Mind on Fire by goatlover on Thursday September 23, 2021 @07:08PM (#28636754)
So let’s say we pick the meanings for consciousness. Will that settle the debate over the nature of consciousness? Would David Chalmers and Daniel Dennett agree on qualia? Evidence is that they would not. Both are quite capable of understanding and using each other’s terms. But yet they fundamentally disagree, as do many others.

This suggests, as Chalmers has pointed out, that the disagreement is not semantic. It’s rather a substantial philosophical issue. No linguistic analysis will resolve the debate. Science might someday, if the matter can be settled empirically.

Re:Ludwig Wittgenstein: A Mind on Fire by colechristensen on Thursday September 23, 2021 @09:16PM (#28637581)
Consciousness being one of the fundamental hard problems of course, it is not just a matter of coming to terms. My point was not that philosophical issues don’t exist and of course one of the biggest philosophical issues isn’t just definitions :)

In this case it comes to something also very common in philosophy, discussions that can be questioned as “are we discussing terms or philosophy or both at the same time?” and often the case is “both” making it very hard to have a philosophical discussion when opposing sides disagree both on the terminology and the philosophy and don’t separate the two disagreements very well.

Re:Ludwig Wittgenstein: A Mind on Fire by goatlover on Friday September 24, 2021 @01:19AM (#28638881)
I've seen that disagreement all the time online with philosophical discussions where opposing sides use different definitions and refuse to accept the same terminology. I wonder though if professional philosophers are more careful and exact. My interpretation of most online philosophical argument is that semantic disputes are somewhat intentional, because people do not want to give the other side any ground to stand on. Agreeing to terms could mean the arguments based on those terms have some merit.