Comparing consciousness to plastic surgery seems to me to be a false analogy. If you have your model of particles bouncing around, then plastic surgery is a label you can put on a particular class of sequences of particles doing things. If you didn’t have the name, there wouldn’t be anything to explain, the particles can still do the same thing. Consciousness/subjective experience describes something that is fundamentally non-material. It may or may not be cause by particles doing things, but it’s not itself made of particles.
If your response to this is that there is no such thing as subjective experience—which is what I thought your position was, and what I understand strong illusionism to be—then this is exactly what I mean when I say consciousness isn’t real. By ‘consciousness’, I’m exclusively referring to the qualitatively different thing called subjective experience. This thing either exists or doesn’t exist. I’m not talking about the process that makes people move their fingers to type things about consciousness.
I apologize for not tabooing ‘real’, but I don’t have a model of how ‘is consciousness real’ can be anything but a well-defined question whose answer is either ‘yes’ or ‘no’. The ‘as real as X’ framing doesn’t make any sense to me. it seems like trying to apply a spectrum to a binary question.
Consciousness/subjective experience describes something that is fundamentally non-material.
More non-material than “love” or “three”?
It makes sense to me to think of “three” as being “real” in some sense independently from the existence of any collection of three physical objects, and in that sense having a non-material existence. (And maybe you could say the same thing for abstract concepts like “love”.)
And also, three-ness is a pattern that collections of physical things might correspond to.
Do you think of consciousness as being non-material in a similar way? (Where the concept is not fundamentally a material thing, but you can identify it with collections of particles.)
Comparing consciousness to plastic surgery seems to me to be a false analogy. If you have your model of particles bouncing around, then plastic surgery is a label you can put on a particular class of sequences of particles doing things. If you didn’t have the name, there wouldn’t be anything to explain, the particles can still do the same thing. Consciousness/subjective experience describes something that is fundamentally non-material. It may or may not be cause by particles doing things, but it’s not itself made of particles.
If your response to this is that there is no such thing as subjective experience—which is what I thought your position was, and what I understand strong illusionism to be—then this is exactly what I mean when I say consciousness isn’t real. By ‘consciousness’, I’m exclusively referring to the qualitatively different thing called subjective experience. This thing either exists or doesn’t exist. I’m not talking about the process that makes people move their fingers to type things about consciousness.
I apologize for not tabooing ‘real’, but I don’t have a model of how ‘is consciousness real’ can be anything but a well-defined question whose answer is either ‘yes’ or ‘no’. The ‘as real as X’ framing doesn’t make any sense to me. it seems like trying to apply a spectrum to a binary question.
More non-material than “love” or “three”?
It makes sense to me to think of “three” as being “real” in some sense independently from the existence of any collection of three physical objects, and in that sense having a non-material existence. (And maybe you could say the same thing for abstract concepts like “love”.)
And also, three-ness is a pattern that collections of physical things might correspond to.
Do you think of consciousness as being non-material in a similar way? (Where the concept is not fundamentally a material thing, but you can identify it with collections of particles.)