Three horsemen and a nutcake?

I had a psych professor who said there was no such thing as consciousness. I figured he must be using some trick definition of the term, since the one thing I think I can be certain of--more so than the existence of the professor in question--is my consciousness. By that I mean my inner mental states, particularly the internal subjective perception of being self aware. Descartes' "I think therefore I am" has a couple of different interpretations, but one that I find most compelling is the undeniable reality of one's own consciousness. I wondered if maybe my professor was really an android or a zombie, who just hasn't experienced these inner states philosopher's call "qualia'. But today I discovered another professor who takes the same position: none other than atheist "Horseman" of Four Horsemen fame, Daniel Dennett.

Dennett has, instead, another concept of consciousness in which our internal experiences are left out. He goes on and on to make crystal clear that he doesn't believe in subjective experiences, qualia or other such nonsense. He's either a nutcase, a zombie, an android or, more likely, an academic so caught up in his methodological devotion to behaviorism that he must categorically deny anything that doesn't fit the behaviorist paradigm.

Okay, giving Dennett and my psych professor the benefit of the doubt, they surely must be aware of the subjective aspect of consciousness (although they don't sound like it) but as "scientists" they may find it so awkward to deal with it they dismiss it as non-existent as a practical psychological variable. But it seems I'm not the only one who gets the impression they are really stubbornly denying the existence of internal mental states altogether. John Searle, a philosophy prof at Berkeley, writes: "I think most readers when told this , would assume that I must be misunderstanding him. Surely no sane person could deny the existence of feelings. But in his reply he makes it clear that I have understood him exactly. He says, how could anyone deny that ?! Just watch..." And that would make me reluctant to trust anything further Dennett has to say: especially on the existence of God, who also eludes laboratory paradigms. One horseman down, three to go.

 

Psychology does exist though, and for that there is all of a sudden no such thing as Metaphysics proper. Metaphysics would need that every darn soul in the city have the true feeling of comparing their existence in Nature for a sort of Consciousness for an Image of even well-being. How does natural world solitude and memories of solitude justify human being's sense of realism for the observations scientists get treated for given truth? No way, again. We become robbed of the meaning of wealth in the self-consciousness (again that word) of the world historically reconciled with the Judgment that we survive because we have trusted the successful.

The successful prove what each one of us needs to make it undeceived of the false communication.

 

Say what?

 

I guess, we can use the word consciousness esoterically for some people while not for other people. I am such a person which the word applies in the wholly ontological manner.

 

Good for you.

 

Are there any quotes or sources in particular that sparked this thread?

I'm not a philosopher, so I'm out of my depth here really, but I have watched the horseman discussions and I'm in the middle of Darwin's Dangerous Idea. Dennett seems eloquent and immensely intelligent, and I always enjoy his input. He doesn't seem like a nutcake to me

 

OP is having "the standard reaction":

"The standard reaction to this claim is the complacent acnowledgement that while some people may indeed have succumed to one confusion or fanaticism or another, one's own appeal to a modest, innocent notion of properties of subjective experience is surely safe. It is just that pre-sumption of innocence i want to overthrow. I want to shift the burden of proof, so that anyone who wants to appeal to private, subjective properties has to prove first that in doing so they are not making a mistake."

Dennett, Daniel (1991), Allen Lane, ed, Consciousness Explained pg.619

 

So the zombie is articulate. Do you find this statement persuasive? Are you a zombie, too? Have you considered the possibility? The "standard reaction" he's referring to is the normal reaction of an ordinary person to a position that is stark raving mad. The statement you quote might be very persuasive to anyone who hasn't experienced the inner awareness most of us call consciousness. Denenett is saying that the burden of proof is on me and others who think we are experiencing inner mental processes and feelings to show that in doing so we're not making a mistake. This is tantamount to a blind person insisting that the sighted prove that they are experiencing sight. Some things are a debatable. This point however is asking people to doubt their most immediate experience of reality. As Professor Searle remarks:"... where the existence of conscious states is concerned, you can't make the distinction between appearance and reality, because the existence of the appearance is the reality in question. If it consciously seems to me that I am conscious then I am conscious. It is not a matter of intuitions, of something I feel inclined to say. Nor is it a matter of methodology. Rather is is just a plain fact about me and every other normal human being--that we have sensations and other sorts of conscious states." (Searle, The Mystery of Consciousness, p 122.) Or I could enlist the aid of another "Horseman", neuroscientist and atheist Sam Harris, who deals with consciousness for a living, and who acknowledges "that peculiar, interior dimension that each of us experiences as consciousness in his own case" (The End of Faith,p. 208). I think it's far more debatable that Dennett exists than that I or the rest of us are experiencing subjective inner states of consciousness.

 

when murdering ...

 

when murdering the appearance doesn't change reality , why never cut your hair for a job again ? because you can be loved wild , and by this you are at least allowed to exist on crumbs . oh , well .

that Dennet seems to be contentedly , regularly fed and always on time and has never known anything else than civilized entitlement .

 

"while consciousness and subjective experience exist in some sense, they are not as the zombie argument proponent claims. The experience of pain, for example, is not something that can be stripped off a person's mental life without bringing about any behavioural or physiological differences. consciousness is a complex series of functions and ideas. If we all can have these experiences the idea of the zombie is meaningless."

"when philosophers claim that zombies are conceivable, they invariably underestimate the task of conception (or imagination), and end up imagining something that violates their own definition".


He coined the term zimboes (p-zombies that have second-order beliefs) to argue that the idea of a p-zombie is incoherent

"Zimboes think they are conscious, think they have qualia, think they suffer pains – they are just 'wrong' (according to this lamentable tradition), in ways that neither they nor we could ever discover!".

As p-zombies in an observed world would be indistinguishable from the observer (and therefore non-existent as a class) one must either believe that anyone, including oneself, might be a zombie or else that no one may be a zombie. One's own conviction about being (or not being) a zombie is a product of the physical world and is no different from anyone else's. When a distinction is made in one's mind between a hypothetical zombie and oneself (assumed not to be a zombie), this concept of oneself (under reductive physicalism) can only correspond to physical reality. The hypothetical zombie, which is only a subset of the concept of oneself, will entail a deficit in observables (cognitive systems), contradicting the original definition of a zombie.

 

Sounds to me like your professor proved his own point by speaking.

 

The thread was sparked by my reading of Dennett's 511 page book, Consciousness Explained. I know that Dennett is "eloquent and immensely intelligent", which adds to the paradox. I read his Breaking the Spell and although I didn't agree with it, I viewed it as an impressive work of scholarship. But Consciousness Explained goes beyond mere difference of opinion. As I said, there are few aspects of reality that are indisputable, but I think our subjective inner life is one of them--the most immediately verifiable aspect of existence. If anyone can get us to believe we don't have that experience, (s)he could get us to believe anything. But it seems that Dennett is embarked on that very enterprise.

I mentioned encountering this idea before, from my psych professor, who was also quite intelligent and a nice guy, but like Dennett, totally out to lunch on this subject, raising the question "How could this be?" My theory is that they've both become such prisoners of the disciplinary apparatus that has come to define their worldview that they are fundamentally out of touch with reality on this subject. My professor is a "rat psychologist" and an adherent to the school of psychology known as Behaviorism, which tries to eliminate mental states from psychology and to focus entirely on behaviors. I have no quarrel with that, if it's viewed as just a position that it's more fruitful to focus on the hard data of behavior than to mess with subjective mental states. But it's something different to maintain that the subjective mental states don't exist at all. As C.K. Ogden and I.A. Richardson put it, to believe in behaviorism in that sense, you have to be "affecting general anesthesia" (The Meaning of Meaning, p.23). Dennett's teacher at Oxford was Gilbert Ryle, behaviorist philosopher and critic of the concept of "mind". I think Dennett has been brainwashed, carried the approach to an extreme, and has difficulty distinguishing between computer intelligence and human minds.

 

i agree . conciousness is most apparent when survival
depends on it . it strives . it intersects with otherness
essentially . it may require dancing with bears .

 

where in the Nutcakes.... this rapture sucks..

 

I'm working on the idea of Kant's mentally re-arrangable past.

Easy: from the realist to the idealist position.

 

Is no more than the rearranged present. We view things in corridors of refraction and the hall of mirrors changes according to attitude or line of sight.
The individual experience is always a simulation. There are no discrete systems.
We all idealistically view the world as perception is bound by conception.

 

And the conception, dear; I wish relaxxx could laugh at himself. The world has ended; I am alone for all these unsociable reasons.

"Nobody likes me. Nobody likes me.":cowboy:

 

May I participate in unsociable causes, I have nail fungus and I pick my nose.

 

That's involved with the end of the World. Sorry, I missed you there; thedope.