We can split situations where miscommunication about the meaning of words persists despites repeated attempts by all sides to resolve it into three broad categories. On the one hand, you have those that come about because of (explicit or implicit) definitional disputes, such as the famous debate (mentioned in the Sequences) over whether trees that fall make sounds if nobody is around to hear them. Different people might have give different responses (literally ‘yes’ vs ‘no’ in this case), but this is simply because they interpret the words involved differently. When you replace the symbol with the substance, you realize that there is no empirical difference in what anticipated experiences the two sides have, and thus the entire debate is revealed to be a waste of time. By dissolving the question, you have resolved it.
That does not capture the entire cluster of persistent semantic disagreements, however, because there is one other possible upstream generator of controversy, namely the fact that, often times, the concept itself is confused. This often comes about because one side (or both) reifies or gives undue consideration to a mental construct that does not correspond to reality; perhaps the concept of ‘justice’ is an example of this, or the notion of observer-independent morality (if you subscribe to either moral anti-realism or to the non-mainstream Yudkowskian conception of realism). In this case, it is generally worthwhile to spend the time necessary to bring everyone on the same page that the concept itself should be abandoned and we should avoid trying to make sense of reality through frameworks that include it.
But, sometimes, we talk about confusing concepts not because the concepts themselves ultimately do not make sense in the territory (as opposed to our fallible maps), but because we simply lack the gears-level understanding required to make sense of our first-person, sensual experiences. All we can do is bumble around, trying to gesture at what we are confused about (like consciousness, qualia, etc), without the ability to pin it down with surgical precision. Not because our language is inadequate, not[1] because the concept we are honing in on is inherently nonsensical, but because we are like cavemen trying to reason about the nature of the stars in the sky. The stars are not an illusion, but our hypotheses about them (‘they are Gods’ or ‘they are fallen warriors’ etc) are completely incompatible with reality. Not due to language barriers or anything like that, but because we lack the large foundation and body of knowledge needed to even orient ourselves properly around them.
To me, consciousness falls into the third category. If you taboo too many of the most natural, intuitive ways of talking about it, you are not benefitting from a more careful and precise discussion of the concepts involved. On the contrary, you are instead forcing people who lack the necessary subject-matter knowledge (i.e., arguably all of us) to make up their own hypotheses about how it functions. Of course they will come to different conclusions; after all, the hard problem of consciousness is still far from being settled!
Tabooing words is bad if, by tabooing, you are denying your interlocutors the ability to accurately express the concepts in their minds.
We can split situations where miscommunication about the meaning of words persists despites repeated attempts by all sides to resolve it into three broad categories. On the one hand, you have those that come about because of (explicit or implicit) definitional disputes, such as the famous debate (mentioned in the Sequences) over whether trees that fall make sounds if nobody is around to hear them. Different people might have give different responses (literally ‘yes’ vs ‘no’ in this case), but this is simply because they interpret the words involved differently. When you replace the symbol with the substance, you realize that there is no empirical difference in what anticipated experiences the two sides have, and thus the entire debate is revealed to be a waste of time. By dissolving the question, you have resolved it.
That does not capture the entire cluster of persistent semantic disagreements, however, because there is one other possible upstream generator of controversy, namely the fact that, often times, the concept itself is confused. This often comes about because one side (or both) reifies or gives undue consideration to a mental construct that does not correspond to reality; perhaps the concept of ‘justice’ is an example of this, or the notion of observer-independent morality (if you subscribe to either moral anti-realism or to the non-mainstream Yudkowskian conception of realism). In this case, it is generally worthwhile to spend the time necessary to bring everyone on the same page that the concept itself should be abandoned and we should avoid trying to make sense of reality through frameworks that include it.
But, sometimes, we talk about confusing concepts not because the concepts themselves ultimately do not make sense in the territory (as opposed to our fallible maps), but because we simply lack the gears-level understanding required to make sense of our first-person, sensual experiences. All we can do is bumble around, trying to gesture at what we are confused about (like consciousness, qualia, etc), without the ability to pin it down with surgical precision. Not because our language is inadequate, not[1] because the concept we are honing in on is inherently nonsensical, but because we are like cavemen trying to reason about the nature of the stars in the sky. The stars are not an illusion, but our hypotheses about them (‘they are Gods’ or ‘they are fallen warriors’ etc) are completely incompatible with reality. Not due to language barriers or anything like that, but because we lack the large foundation and body of knowledge needed to even orient ourselves properly around them.
To me, consciousness falls into the third category. If you taboo too many of the most natural, intuitive ways of talking about it, you are not benefitting from a more careful and precise discussion of the concepts involved. On the contrary, you are instead forcing people who lack the necessary subject-matter knowledge (i.e., arguably all of us) to make up their own hypotheses about how it functions. Of course they will come to different conclusions; after all, the hard problem of consciousness is still far from being settled!
At least not necessarily because of this; you can certainly take an illusionistic perspective on the nature of consciousness.