Comment by hax0ron3
3 years ago
>are simply a linguistic sleight of hand masking a plain old dualistic standpoint
Are you assuming that dualism is invalid? If so, why? There is something to the distinction between physical reality and subjective experience that so far no-one has managed to explain.
>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"
Then it would not be a complete physicalist explanation of consciousness. A complete physicalist explanation of consciousness, by definition, would have to account for subjective experience/qualia/whatever you want to call it.
I think one can salvage the distinction between physical reality and subjective experience without positing an abstract ("Cartesian") dualism. It just so happens that most experiences can be categorized as being either external or internal, so we are led to believe that every experience fits into one and only one bucket. But I think that there are plenty of experiences that are not so easily categorized (e.g. feelings).
Demanding that there must be a perfect partition (i.e. assuming dualism) is an additional requirement, but it's not obvious that it should be a good requirement for a sound philosophical theory. In fact I believe it not to be sound, and I believe many philosophical hard problems come from bending over backwards trying to impose this condition.
>Are you assuming that dualism is invalid?
I am only noting a reliance of Nagel's bat arguments on dualist assumptions. Those who reject dualism can then draw their own conclusions ;)
>Then it would not be a complete physicalist explanation of consciousness. A complete physicalist explanation of consciousness, by definition, would have to account for subjective experience/qualia/whatever you want to call it.
For sure a physicalist explanation must somehow deal with these things, but what I mean is that it could turn out that the question "what is it like to be a bat?" is simply incoherent. If a question is in principle unanswerable, self-contradictory or nonsensical, then we can't very well demand an explanation.