There is though another point I find interesting related to past vs. current feelings/awareness and illusionism, even if I’m not sure it’s eventually really relevant (and I guess goes not in the direction of what you meant): I wonder whether the differences and parallels between awareness about past feelings and concurrent feelings/awareness can overall help the illusionist defend his illusionism:
Most of us would agree we can theoretically ‘simply’ (well yes, in theory..) rewire/tweak your synapses to give you a wrong memory of your past feelings. We could tweak things in your brain’s memory so that you believe you’ll have had experiences with certain feelings in the past, even if this past experience had never taken place.
If we defend our current view of having had certain past feelings as much as we tend to defend that we now have the sentience/feelings we feel we have, this is interesting, as we have then two categories of insights to our qualia (the past and the current ones) we’re equally willing to defend, all while knowing some of them could have been purely fabricated and never existed.
Do we defend to know that we had our past feelings/sentience, just as much as we do with concurrent feelings/sentience? I’m not sure.
Clearly, being aware of the rewiring possibility described above, we’d easily say: ok, I might be wrong. But more relevant could be if we wonder whether, say, historic humans w/o awareness of their brain structure, of neurons etc. (and thus w/o the rewiring possibility in their mind), whether they would have not insisted just as much that their knowledge about having felt past feelings is just as infallible as their knowledge about their current feelings. I so far see this some sort of support for the possibility of illusionism despite our outrage against it; though not sure yet it’s really watertight.
If the first paragraph in your comment would be entirely true, this could make this line of pro-illusionist argumentation in theory even simpler (though I’m personally not entirely sure your first paragraph really can be stated as simple as that).
There is though another point I find interesting related to past vs. current feelings/awareness and illusionism, even if I’m not sure it’s eventually really relevant (and I guess goes not in the direction of what you meant): I wonder whether the differences and parallels between awareness about past feelings and concurrent feelings/awareness can overall help the illusionist defend his illusionism:
Most of us would agree we can theoretically ‘simply’ (well yes, in theory..) rewire/tweak your synapses to give you a wrong memory of your past feelings. We could tweak things in your brain’s memory so that you believe you’ll have had experiences with certain feelings in the past, even if this past experience had never taken place.
If we defend our current view of having had certain past feelings as much as we tend to defend that we now have the sentience/feelings we feel we have, this is interesting, as we have then two categories of insights to our qualia (the past and the current ones) we’re equally willing to defend, all while knowing some of them could have been purely fabricated and never existed.
Do we defend to know that we had our past feelings/sentience, just as much as we do with concurrent feelings/sentience? I’m not sure.
Clearly, being aware of the rewiring possibility described above, we’d easily say: ok, I might be wrong. But more relevant could be if we wonder whether, say, historic humans w/o awareness of their brain structure, of neurons etc. (and thus w/o the rewiring possibility in their mind), whether they would have not insisted just as much that their knowledge about having felt past feelings is just as infallible as their knowledge about their current feelings. I so far see this some sort of support for the possibility of illusionism despite our outrage against it; though not sure yet it’s really watertight.
If the first paragraph in your comment would be entirely true, this could make this line of pro-illusionist argumentation in theory even simpler (though I’m personally not entirely sure your first paragraph really can be stated as simple as that).