What this article and most others lack is an adult treatment of why serious neuroscientists and philosphers of the mind feel the problem is in fact, hard.
To me, the fact that illusion and hallucination are being invoked is strong evidence of handwaving being engaged in to dismiss an otherwise difficult problem. This is not a scientifically rigorous explanation and it doesn't take the other side seriously.
As a younger guy, I read Dennet and mistook him for a serious thinker. Then I read his rebuttals of his opponents and all he did was accuse them of 'residual christianity' and make profane acrostic poems. These guys just aren't taking the other side seriously and it's kinda silly honestly.
> To me, the fact that illusion and hallucination are being invoked is strong evidence of handwaving being engaged in to dismiss an otherwise difficult problem.
Dennett doesn't dismiss the difficulty of the problem, he just dismisses that the difficulty is where people think it is. For instance, he would fully agree that the brain is insanely complex and just elaborating how information processing works will be very, very challenging. His opponents then say from this position of ignorance on how this works, "but even if you explain all of this, there's still something left to explain!"
Is there really though? How could they possibly know this? It's a classic god of the gaps argument/argument from ignorance that theists use to cling to their deities or support intelligent design, hence "residual christianity". After all of this time debating consciousness, the very best arguments we have for qualia that cannot be captured mechanistically are thought experiments that are easily dismissed as circular (and which Dennett has ably deconstructed to show their vacuousness).
Frankly, I find Dennett's rebuttals are brutally logical and pragmatic.
If one is a "phenomenological zombie", i.e. does not have subjective experience (SE), then Dennett's position is the only one that makes any sense. The only thing to explain, is why others are believing this SE illusion.
Those of us who do have SE, and have recognized it, know something the zombies cannot know: that SE must exist.
No, you have a perception that you think entails subjective experience. Surely you would acknowledge the many ways you or others could fool your other perceptions, but it's frankly confusing that you think this simply cannot happen to your perception of subjective awareness. The fact is, if this illusion was adaptive in evolutionary terms, which it arguably is, then you would have developed such an illusory perception.
>but it's frankly confusing that you think this simply cannot happen to your perception of subjective awareness
Because subjective awareness is not a perception, they're two entirely different kinds of of concepts. Equating the two would seems stranger to me than equating say the feeling of pain with the concept of a needle. You could convince me both the needle and the pain are illusionary, but not that my experience is. That you seem to be genuinely convinced that subjective experience and our flawed sensory apparatuses are even in the same ballpark implies to me that you probably either do not have that experience, or that unlike in my case, your experience is somehow not connected to the output that typing fingers can produce
> Because subjective awareness is not a perception, they're two entirely different kinds of of concepts.
Not under eliminative materialism.
> You could convince me both the needle and the pain are illusionary, but not that my experience is.
The ineffability of the experience of the pain is the qualia that needs explanation, the rest are all compatible with mechanistic explanations. It is the ineffable quality that disappears under any serious scrutiny.
Edit: if you want to understand how eliminativism can work scientifically, I suggested reading this paper:
An analogy for tech nerds would be how the illusion of multitasking on a single CPU machine arises from imperceptibly fast context switching. Something similar happens in that theory, where our perceptual faculties are constantly switching between perceptual signals from our internal representation of the world, and the perceptual signals from our senses.
I'm specifically referring to reviews and comments Dennet has made of the work of totally secular, atheist or agnostic , non Christian philosphers of mind and neuroscientists. He literally just tosses insults around in some of his reviews and it's kinda pathetic that such an eminent scholar engages in such tactics.
Overall, He does dismiss the hard problem, calling it stage magic. This is exactly the tactic you might imagine an intelligent man would use after having spent a lifetime to fail to explain anything meaningful.
> Overall, He does dismiss the hard problem, calling it stage magic.
Because it is stage magic given his theory of mind, which he elaborated 30 years ago. I would certainly like to see these insults though if you could provide a citation.
Well, I think in some sense it's all just "controlled" hallucination, but, to me, it doesn't say much.
Sometimes I think people have some intuitive sense of how things ought to work but but they can't reconcile it with physics description of the world. For example, how is it possible that a physical system such as a brain can have experiences, such as colors, love, objects, music, etc.
I think the simplest answer to that conundrum is that, yes, physical systems can not have these sorts of experiences, they do not follow from the theories or descriptions. But what you can do instead is simulate a world with such magical qualities. This is what I think some parts of the brain do, is to simulate the world that we personally find ourselves in.
Then the real question is how does the brain do that? How does it work? What are its learning rules? What does it end up learning?
My guess is that it ends up describing this universe (including ourselves) that we find ourselves in.
Why? You could imagine that the signals coming into the brain from the rest of the body are just a bit array that is changing all the time. What does it mean? That's for the brain to find out, so it's always in the process of making and updating predictive models of its input. Why? So that the biological robot that you are in control of navigate successfully in the physical world and meet the needs of the organism, e.g. eat food, drink water, keep itself in the right temperature, keep itself from being harmed, and such.
> To me, the fact that illusion and hallucination are being invoked is strong evidence of handwaving being engaged in to dismiss an otherwise difficult problem. This is not a scientifically rigorous explanation and it doesn't take the other side seriously.
Yeah. IIRC, some people say the passage of time is an illusion too. It's pretty hard for me to take seriously anyone who defends their favored theory or interpretation by hand-waving away contrary but fundamental observations as illusions.
> some people say the passage of time is an illusion too
Well, as the article says, the brain makes top-down predictions about our future. So the experience of time is a controlled illusion updated frequently with sense data.
I find the illusion explanation for complex phenomena unhelpful.
At best, this is doing nothing to actually explain - it has no value. 'Well yes, consciousness is difficult to understand because of an error in our reasoning' . It's almost circular reasoning ... you're explaining mental phenomena with mental phenomena.
To me, the fact that illusion and hallucination are being invoked is strong evidence of handwaving being engaged in to dismiss an otherwise difficult problem. This is not a scientifically rigorous explanation and it doesn't take the other side seriously.
As a younger guy, I read Dennet and mistook him for a serious thinker. Then I read his rebuttals of his opponents and all he did was accuse them of 'residual christianity' and make profane acrostic poems. These guys just aren't taking the other side seriously and it's kinda silly honestly.