Comment by mistidoi
6 days ago
I found this article really frustrating.
The author takes a blurry position between non-dualist naturalists like John Searle and eliminativists like Dennett and the Churchlands and doesn't seem to engage with them at all, much less probing into the issues with those views that might motivate people like Chalmers and Nagel.
It crescendos with a hand-wave:
> The mind is the behavior of the brain, properly described in a high-level language. Neither my own experience of myself nor an external experience of me is primary[.]
A number of views about consciousness are compatible with statements like that (like the ones above and many others), each with their own philosophical tradeoffs and bullets to bite. The author seems generally unaware of them yet somehow confident that they've solved the matter.
It's because he's not a philosopher and is wading into a long-standing philosophical debate and hand-waving away all the actual issues in contention.
I find this subject frustrating. People actually know very little about it, yet they end up telling and debating complex stories about it.
Yeah. There's something to be said for sticking to the little known as far as possible.
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