Atla wrote: ↑Sun Dec 24, 2017 11:29 pm
As far as I know Chalmers is a not too bright dualist, he doesn't understand the full extent of the hard problem.
Of course in actuality, the hard problem has nothing to do with sensory organs. And I never said that rocks have 'rich inner life', on the contrary, it probably mostly would be like "static noise" compared to a human's experience, would you stop quoting things I didn't write?
If you read more attentively you would see I attributed the quote to Chalmers, the formulator of the 'hard problem', the one you say that you were writing about.
Of course I'm not on the same page as anyone else, I'm a nondualist. That's like 1 in 1000 in the West or less. Nondualism is the correct view, which is why Western philosophy has been running in nonsensical circles for hundreds of years.
Almost no one ever understands my position so I'm used to that actually.
So one possibility is that 99.9% of us are all like Chalmers, '
not too bright'. But there is another possibility.
I don't know what you are talking about, there was zero hint in your example about actual dualism. All I see is you made up some material-mental categories and trying to misinterpret everything that way. Do you cherrypick which word is "mental" and which is "material" or how does that work? Do things change magically when they enter the head? Or what? You are trapped in dualistic circular reasoning.
Me: I do not understand what you mean by 'conscious in a soft problem sense'.
As opposed to the hard problem sense. Conscious, consciousness has many different definitions, uses depending on context, at least 3-4, don't tell me you use one?
The 'soft problem(s)' is not a definition of consciousness! (Nor is the 'hard problem'). Google 'hard problem of consciousness' (it will also explain what the 'soft problems' are meant to be.) These phrases do not mean what you think they do. No wonder we have difficulty communicating!
And I am doubtful if you really understand what 'dualism' is:
You keep making the argument that dualism is needed because: experiencing something from the inside and viewing it from the outside as a representation of material structure isn't the same.
That's the same as saying that when we look at a tree, we should automatically feel what it's like to be that tree. But that's not the case, so there is a fundamental problem here.
I do not understand why you can never get this!
When we look at a tree, we see the tree whether we want to or not. It is always there, there are a set of regular sensory characteristics that go with it. This suggests that something about the tree is independent of our will, that the tree does not exist only as our idea, it exists in its own right, that there is an external world, a 'material' world. That hypothesis has served us very well, it is the basis of science. By positing the existence of a non-conscious, regular, material world, we are able to predict future experiences.
But nor is our consciousness entirely regulated and outside our will. We can imagine the tree as other than it is, we can conceptualise it, universalize it and so on. We can also be mistaken about trees etc. But as Descartes put it, even if we close our eyes and deny all our sensations of trees and everything else in the external world, we are still aware of ourselves, thinking. And our presence to ourselves is a real to us as the presence of that tree.
So, the dual nature of our consciousness experiences gives rise to the idea that there is both an external world and an internal world, the physical and the mental. (And this also applies to our own bodies; my brain is an object to me, like the tree. But my thoughts are not an object to me, they
are me.) And the problem is then of how these two realms are related. That is 'dualism'.
So, you see, it is not about an ability to '
feel what it's like to be that tree'. I am perhaps simplifying too much, but even so I worry you will miss the point! I am not trying to sell you something, I'm simply trying to explain what the term 'dualism' is understood to refer to.
You may have a wonderful original view of consciousness, but unless you use terms like 'dualism', 'soft problems', 'hard problem' etc. in the same way as everyone else you will never be able to communicate it. You say you are not on the same page as everyone else. I think you should work back through the book until you are; what do we all agree on?
Then try to move forward, through methodical argument.