[ExI] Chalmers

Will Steinberg steinberg.will at gmail.com
Tue Dec 17 02:59:23 UTC 2019


Yes, "consciousness is an illusion" is nonsense.  The word illusion
presupposes an object of the illusion.  That object is the consicousness.
Illusion is qualia!

As for the A- and P- distinction, I thought we just called A-
'self-consciousness' and P- 'consciousness'.

Self-consciousness isn't that much of a hard problem in my opinion.  That's
just Hofstadter's strange loop.  Brain making maps of itself.  Recursion
etc.  Turtles perhaps not all the way down but enough to make a perception
of oneself.

The P- is hard because it is apparently irreducible.  It seems unlike any
other substance or action in physics so in my opinion the only solution is
to open up physics to accommodate qualia.

Whether you would call this 'dualism'--do we call it dualism when the
standard model is split between fermions and bosons, when fermions are
split between quarks and leptons?  No, so maybe I am not a dualist.  There
is one model.  It just happens to include consciousness.

Perhaps it is affiliated with only certain aspects of the universe that we
already know, like force carriage.  Perhaps it is affiliated with dark
matter, which I think is more likely than some think.  I dunno, but it's
definitely not emergent from anything we know.
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