Huh. I’m a bit surprised. I guess I thought that since a lot of the stuff I’ve read by Eliezer seems heavily influenced by Dennet. And he’s also a physicalist. His approach also seems to be “explain our claims about consciousness”. Plus there’s all the stuff about self reflection, how an algorithm feels from the inside etc. I guess I was just bucketing that stuff together with (weak) illusionism. After writing that out, I can see how those points doesn’t imply illusionism. Does Eliezer think we can save the phenomena of consciousness and hence it calling it an illusion is a mistake? Or is there something else going on there?
I think Dennett’s argumentation about the hard problem of consciousness has usually been terrible, and I don’t see him as an important forerunner of illusionism, though he’s an example of someone who soldiered on for anti-realism about phenomenal consciousness for long stretches of time where the arguments were lacking.
I think I remember Eliezer saying somewhere that he also wasn’t impressed with Dennett’s takes on the hard problem, but I forget where?
His approach also seems to be “explain our claims about consciousness”.
There’s some similarity between heterophenomenology and the way Eliezer/Nate talk about consciousness, though I guess I think of Eliezer/Nate’s “let’s find a theory that makes sense of our claims about consciousness” as more “here’s a necessary feature of any account of consciousness, and a plausibly fruitful way to get insight into a lot of what’s going on”, not as an argument for otherwise ignoring all introspective data. Heterophenomenology IMO was always a somewhat silly and confused idea, because it’s proposing that we a priori reject introspective evidence but it’s not giving a clear argument for why.
(Or, worse, it’s arguing something orthogonal to whether we should care about introspective evidence, while winking and nudging that there’s something vaguely unrespectable about the introspective-evidence question.)
There are good arguments for being skeptical of introspection here, but “that doesn’t sound like it’s in the literary genre of science” should not be an argument that Bayesians find very compelling.
Huh. I’m a bit surprised. I guess I thought that since a lot of the stuff I’ve read by Eliezer seems heavily influenced by Dennet. And he’s also a physicalist. His approach also seems to be “explain our claims about consciousness”. Plus there’s all the stuff about self reflection, how an algorithm feels from the inside etc. I guess I was just bucketing that stuff together with (weak) illusionism. After writing that out, I can see how those points doesn’t imply illusionism. Does Eliezer think we can save the phenomena of consciousness and hence it calling it an illusion is a mistake? Or is there something else going on there?
I think Dennett’s argumentation about the hard problem of consciousness has usually been terrible, and I don’t see him as an important forerunner of illusionism, though he’s an example of someone who soldiered on for anti-realism about phenomenal consciousness for long stretches of time where the arguments were lacking.
I think I remember Eliezer saying somewhere that he also wasn’t impressed with Dennett’s takes on the hard problem, but I forget where?
There’s some similarity between heterophenomenology and the way Eliezer/Nate talk about consciousness, though I guess I think of Eliezer/Nate’s “let’s find a theory that makes sense of our claims about consciousness” as more “here’s a necessary feature of any account of consciousness, and a plausibly fruitful way to get insight into a lot of what’s going on”, not as an argument for otherwise ignoring all introspective data. Heterophenomenology IMO was always a somewhat silly and confused idea, because it’s proposing that we a priori reject introspective evidence but it’s not giving a clear argument for why.
(Or, worse, it’s arguing something orthogonal to whether we should care about introspective evidence, while winking and nudging that there’s something vaguely unrespectable about the introspective-evidence question.)
There are good arguments for being skeptical of introspection here, but “that doesn’t sound like it’s in the literary genre of science” should not be an argument that Bayesians find very compelling.