Comment by hackinthebochs
3 years ago
>a linguistic sleight of hand masking a plain old dualistic standpoint.
These terms are getting at something central to consciousness, the fact that there is a conceptual duality between how we conceive of it from the first-person and how we conceive of it from an objective standpoint. We can't disavow this conceptual duality, a theorist offering an explanation of consciousness that doesn't capture this dual nature of the phenomenon will be rightly considered eliminating the explananda.
But a conceptual duality does not imply an ontological duality. In other words, the fact that we conceive of consciousness in these seemingly opposing ways does not imply two separate phenomena. The term dualism has become a shibboleth to be avoided in serious philosophy of mind, but this is a mistake. A satisfying explanation of consciousness must offer some phenomena that carries a resemblance to our personal datum as experiencers of sensations. This must then be related to the scientific story of how electrical signals are transformed into behavior. This just is the problem of consciousness. Anything less misses the point.
>For one, the "something" in the 2nd formulation [...] is most readily interpreted as an object, closing the door to any process-like interpretation of consciousness.
I agree that the language we use in describing consciousness is unfortunate and has done real damage to what we consider as promising avenues for investigation. We are cognitively biased towards conceptualizing the world in terms of "things" and so we expect our explanations to also be in terms of things. When consciousness isn't found in thing-ness we are tempted to posit a new kind of thing that carries the conscious properties. But we've been lead off course by our initial conceptualization. I'm in favor of seeing objects as processes rather than discrete units. Consciousness is likely in the active dynamics rather than any static property.
>I can easily imagine a complete physicalist explanation of consciousness which would still not lead to a valid answer of "what is it like to be a bat" due to quite obvious limitations of language or the plain invalidity of the question.
Yeah, we will never know "what its like" to experience the existence of another living creature. But this is just a limitation of physical descriptions. This isn't a demerit of physicalism or materialism as a methodology. This is no reason to turn to alternative methodologies that can only hope to offer pseudo-explanations of consciousness at best.
> A satisfying explanation of consciousness must offer some phenomena that carries a resemblance to our personal datum as experiencers of sensations.
What, in your opinion, would make for a satisfying explanation of consciousness? I think another nontrivial piece of the puzzle is that it's hard to even know what we are looking for. There are many philosophers who argue (convincingly IMHO) that it doesn't make sense to posit a hard problem of consciousness in the first place.
Yeah, its tough to know what a good explanation would even look like. There are so many ways for one thing to resemble another, it's hard to conceive of a new class of resemblance prior to being given an example of it. Resemblance can also depends on one's prior commitments. So its a very dynamic and context dependent property. I don't think there is much hope in identifying what a satisfying explanation of consciousness will look like prior to be presented with one.
That said, I can offer what I take to be a narrowing of the target of promising avenues of investigation. We need a new way to conceptualize existence outside of "thing-based" ontologies. A process ontology would be heading in the right direction. This will perhaps give us the tools to conceptualize a recurrent information-rich dynamical system as a thing in itself (rather than as a collection of individuals with some dynamical behavior). Then we can ask how distinctions are presented to the system on which its behavior and decision-making is determined. A represented distinction is predicated on it being like something or something else to the consumer of the representation such that states can be distinguished. We wouldn't necessarily subjectively resemble this system, but we may recognize our epistemic situation regarding being the target of represented distinctions so that we are confident there is something it is like to be that system.