The “I” is primitively defined by the first-person perspective. After waking up from the experiment, you can naturally tell this person is “I”.It doesn’t matter if there exists another copy physically similar to you. You are not experiencing the world from their perspective.
You can repeat the experiment many times and count your first-person experience. That is the frequentist model.
Your claims about the limitations on knowing about consciousness and free will based on the primitivity of perspective seem to me pretty random.
The perspective that we are taking is a primitive, but I don’t understand why you connect that with consciousness given that the perspective is completely independent on any claims about it being conscious. I don’t see how to link both non-arbitrarily, the mechanisms of consciousness exist regardless of the perspective taken. The epistemic limitations come from facts about brains not from an underlying notion of perspective.
And in the case of free will, there’s no reason why we cannot have a third-person account of what we mean by free will. There’s no problematic loop.
Consciousness has many contending definitions. e.g. if you take the view that consciousness is identified by physical complexity and the ability to process data then it doesn’t have anything to do with perspective. I’m endorsing phenomenal consciousness, as in the hard problem of consciousness: we can describe brain functions purely physically, yet it does not resolve why they are accompanied by subjective feelings. And this “feeling” is entirely first-person, I don’t know your feelings because otherwise, I would be you instead of me. “What it means to be a bat is to know what it is like to be a bat.”
In short, by suggesting they are irreducible and primitive, my position is incompatible with the physicalist’s worldview, in terms of the definition of consciousness, and the nature of perspective. Knowing this might be regarded as a weakness by many, I feel obliged to point it out.
But you’ve generalised your position on perspective beyond conscious beings. My understanding is that perspective is not reducible to non-perspective facts in the theory because the perspective is contingent, but nothing there explicitly refers to consciousness.
You can adopt mutatus mutandis a different perspective in the description of a problem and arrive to the right conclusion. There’s no appeal to a phenomenal perspective there.
The epistemic limitations of minds that map to the idea of a perspective-centric epistemology and metaphysics come from facts about brains.
I didn’t “choose” to generalize my position beyond conscious beings. It is an integral part of it. If perspectives are valid only for things that are conscious (however that is defined), then perspective has some prerequisite and is no longer fundamental. It would also give rise to the age-old reference class problem and no longer be a solution to anthropic paradoxes. E.g. are computer simulations conscious? answers to that would directly determine anthropic problems such as Nick Bostrom’s simulation argument.
Phenomenal consciousness is integral to perspective also in the sense that you know your perspective, i.e. which is the self, precisely because the subjective experience is most immediate to it. So when a subject wakes up in the fission experiment, they know which person “I” refers to even though he cannot point that person out on a map.
My argument is in direct conflict with physicalism. And it places phenomenal consciousness and subjective experience outside the field of physics.
The “I” is primitively defined by the first-person perspective. After waking up from the experiment, you can naturally tell this person is “I”.It doesn’t matter if there exists another copy physically similar to you. You are not experiencing the world from their perspective.
You can repeat the experiment many times and count your first-person experience. That is the frequentist model.
Your claims about the limitations on knowing about consciousness and free will based on the primitivity of perspective seem to me pretty random.
The perspective that we are taking is a primitive, but I don’t understand why you connect that with consciousness given that the perspective is completely independent on any claims about it being conscious. I don’t see how to link both non-arbitrarily, the mechanisms of consciousness exist regardless of the perspective taken. The epistemic limitations come from facts about brains not from an underlying notion of perspective.
And in the case of free will, there’s no reason why we cannot have a third-person account of what we mean by free will. There’s no problematic loop.
Consciousness has many contending definitions. e.g. if you take the view that consciousness is identified by physical complexity and the ability to process data then it doesn’t have anything to do with perspective. I’m endorsing phenomenal consciousness, as in the hard problem of consciousness: we can describe brain functions purely physically, yet it does not resolve why they are accompanied by subjective feelings. And this “feeling” is entirely first-person, I don’t know your feelings because otherwise, I would be you instead of me. “What it means to be a bat is to know what it is like to be a bat.”
In short, by suggesting they are irreducible and primitive, my position is incompatible with the physicalist’s worldview, in terms of the definition of consciousness, and the nature of perspective. Knowing this might be regarded as a weakness by many, I feel obliged to point it out.
But you’ve generalised your position on perspective beyond conscious beings. My understanding is that perspective is not reducible to non-perspective facts in the theory because the perspective is contingent, but nothing there explicitly refers to consciousness.
You can adopt mutatus mutandis a different perspective in the description of a problem and arrive to the right conclusion. There’s no appeal to a phenomenal perspective there.
The epistemic limitations of minds that map to the idea of a perspective-centric epistemology and metaphysics come from facts about brains.
I didn’t “choose” to generalize my position beyond conscious beings. It is an integral part of it. If perspectives are valid only for things that are conscious (however that is defined), then perspective has some prerequisite and is no longer fundamental. It would also give rise to the age-old reference class problem and no longer be a solution to anthropic paradoxes. E.g. are computer simulations conscious? answers to that would directly determine anthropic problems such as Nick Bostrom’s simulation argument.
Phenomenal consciousness is integral to perspective also in the sense that you know your perspective, i.e. which is the self, precisely because the subjective experience is most immediate to it. So when a subject wakes up in the fission experiment, they know which person “I” refers to even though he cannot point that person out on a map.
My argument is in direct conflict with physicalism. And it places phenomenal consciousness and subjective experience outside the field of physics.