Exactly! You don’t! And all this talk of who is born without which brain region and how they went through life gets us no closer at all to actually understanding which physical systems are not zombies.
No, I wouldn’t agree that there are brain lesions that definitely makes you not conscious, I would certainly agree that something like complete brain death makes you less conscious, but we don’t have anything more precise than our vague intuitions born from N=1 subjective data to go by here. We have no idea which kinds of information processing actually lead to qualia. Is consciousness like mass and gravity? in that every tiny bit of the universe has it, and we only notice it when enough coalesces together? or is it more like a phase transition? with simple systems having exactly 0 consciousness, and it suddenly turning on at some level of complexity of computation? Or is the “complexity” even irrelevant, and consciousness refers to just very specific kinds of information processing? None of these questions can be resolved by looking at the behaviour of humans with brain damage, they require a full theory of how subjective feelings map onto physical systems.
Fine. Hard Problem. Maybe panpsychism. I’m not claiming anybody understands how consciousness works. I only object to the “absolutely no idea that this is the case, neither does anyone else.” Given the case I linked to above, we have more than sufficient Bayesian evidence (on balance) to believe that a person can be conscious without a cerebellum, and if that’s what you’re objecting to, I don’t believe you’re still arguing in good faith. If we were talking about the cortex instead, then I’d be with you, but we’re not. You are not allowed to claim everyone has literally zero knowledge given the state of the evidence. That’s just Bayes. You were surprised by the evidence. You should update, not double down.
I don’t like how it sounds but : i think you are missing a lot of biological facts about consciousness and that we’re not as clueless as you seem to think. I definitely recommend reading the book “consciousness and the brain” by stanislas dehaene which is basically a collection of facts onbthe topic.
Exactly! You don’t! And all this talk of who is born without which brain region and how they went through life gets us no closer at all to actually understanding which physical systems are not zombies.
Don’t you agree that certain brain lesion definitely make you not conscious? I think identifying which region is indispensable is important.
If I had to guess human can be conscious without a cerebellum but not without basal ganglia fwiw
No, I wouldn’t agree that there are brain lesions that definitely makes you not conscious, I would certainly agree that something like complete brain death makes you less conscious, but we don’t have anything more precise than our vague intuitions born from N=1 subjective data to go by here. We have no idea which kinds of information processing actually lead to qualia. Is consciousness like mass and gravity? in that every tiny bit of the universe has it, and we only notice it when enough coalesces together? or is it more like a phase transition? with simple systems having exactly 0 consciousness, and it suddenly turning on at some level of complexity of computation? Or is the “complexity” even irrelevant, and consciousness refers to just very specific kinds of information processing? None of these questions can be resolved by looking at the behaviour of humans with brain damage, they require a full theory of how subjective feelings map onto physical systems.
Fine. Hard Problem. Maybe panpsychism. I’m not claiming anybody understands how consciousness works. I only object to the “absolutely no idea that this is the case, neither does anyone else.” Given the case I linked to above, we have more than sufficient Bayesian evidence (on balance) to believe that a person can be conscious without a cerebellum, and if that’s what you’re objecting to, I don’t believe you’re still arguing in good faith. If we were talking about the cortex instead, then I’d be with you, but we’re not. You are not allowed to claim everyone has literally zero knowledge given the state of the evidence. That’s just Bayes. You were surprised by the evidence. You should update, not double down.
I don’t like how it sounds but : i think you are missing a lot of biological facts about consciousness and that we’re not as clueless as you seem to think. I definitely recommend reading the book “consciousness and the brain” by stanislas dehaene which is basically a collection of facts onbthe topic.