The crux of the disagreement, I think, is in the way we understand the self-assessment of our experience. If consciousness is epiphenomenal or just a different level of description of a purely physical world, this self-assessment is entirely algorithmic and does not disclose anything real about the intrinsic nature of consciousness.
But consciousness is not epiphenomenal, and a purely computational account fails to bridge the explanatory gap. Somehow conscious experience can evaluate itself directly, which still remains a not well understood and peculiar fact about the universe. In addition, as I see it, this needs to be acknowledged to make more progress in understanding both ethics and the relationship between the physical world and consciousness.
Indeed, epiphenomenalism can seemingly be easily disproved by its implication that if it were true, then we wouldn’t be able to talk about our consciousness. As I said in the essay, though, consciousness is that of which we can be most certain of, by its directly accessible nature, and I would rather think that we are living in a virtual world under an universe with other, alien physical laws, than that consciousness itself is not real.
The crux of the disagreement, I think, is in the way we understand the self-assessment of our experience. If consciousness is epiphenomenal or just a different level of description of a purely physical world, this self-assessment is entirely algorithmic and does not disclose anything real about the intrinsic nature of consciousness.
But consciousness is not epiphenomenal, and a purely computational account fails to bridge the explanatory gap. Somehow conscious experience can evaluate itself directly, which still remains a not well understood and peculiar fact about the universe. In addition, as I see it, this needs to be acknowledged to make more progress in understanding both ethics and the relationship between the physical world and consciousness.
Indeed, epiphenomenalism can seemingly be easily disproved by its implication that if it were true, then we wouldn’t be able to talk about our consciousness. As I said in the essay, though, consciousness is that of which we can be most certain of, by its directly accessible nature, and I would rather think that we are living in a virtual world under an universe with other, alien physical laws, than that consciousness itself is not real.