I don’t think I agree with this framing. I wasn’t trying to say “people need to rethink their concept of awareness”; I was saying “you haven’t actually demonstrated that there is anything wrong with the naive concept of awareness because the counterexample isn’t a proper counterexample”.
I mean I’ve conceded that people will give this intuitive answer, but only because they’ll respond before they’ve actually run the experiment you suggest. I’m saying that as soon as you (generic you) actually do the thing the post suggested (i.e., look at what you remember at the point in time where you heard the first syllable of a word that you don’t yet recognize), you’ll notice that you do not, in fact, remember hearing & understanding the first part of the word. This doesn’t entail a shift in the understanding of awareness. People can view awareness exactly like they did before, I just want them to actually run the experiment before answering!
(And also this seems like a pretty conceptually straight-forward case—the overarching question is basically, “is there a specific data structure in the brain whose state corresponds to people’s experience at every point in time”—which I think captures the naive view of awareness—and I’m saying “the example doesn’t show that the answer is no”.)
I don’t think I agree with this framing. I wasn’t trying to say “people need to rethink their concept of awareness”; I was saying “you haven’t actually demonstrated that there is anything wrong with the naive concept of awareness because the counterexample isn’t a proper counterexample”.
I mean I’ve conceded that people will give this intuitive answer, but only because they’ll respond before they’ve actually run the experiment you suggest. I’m saying that as soon as you (generic you) actually do the thing the post suggested (i.e., look at what you remember at the point in time where you heard the first syllable of a word that you don’t yet recognize), you’ll notice that you do not, in fact, remember hearing & understanding the first part of the word. This doesn’t entail a shift in the understanding of awareness. People can view awareness exactly like they did before, I just want them to actually run the experiment before answering!
(And also this seems like a pretty conceptually straight-forward case—the overarching question is basically, “is there a specific data structure in the brain whose state corresponds to people’s experience at every point in time”—which I think captures the naive view of awareness—and I’m saying “the example doesn’t show that the answer is no”.)