As a general strategy for considering a black box, great. As a vehicle for defining a mysterious ‘something’ you want to understand, potentially useful but dangerous. Labelling can make a job harder in cases where the ‘thing’ isn’t a thing at all but a result of your confusion. ‘Free will’ is a good example. It’s like naming an animal you plan to eat: makes it harder to kill.
Helpful. We need to put labels on Stuff We Don’t Understand yet so that we know what we are talking about when we try t understand it.
Peter,
As a general strategy for considering a black box, great. As a vehicle for defining a mysterious ‘something’ you want to understand, potentially useful but dangerous. Labelling can make a job harder in cases where the ‘thing’ isn’t a thing at all but a result of your confusion. ‘Free will’ is a good example. It’s like naming an animal you plan to eat: makes it harder to kill.
Ben
But we don’t know that qualia aren;t anything and we don’t know that about free will either.