Not intentional—I’m just not sure whether you see problems with casual closure or with epistemic usefulness.
You can’t just say “if the universe didn’t exist, then lists X and Y wouldn’t exist either”. Sure, maybe that’s true, but it doesn’t constitute any progress towards explaining why the X&Y list contents are what they are. Right?
I wouldn’t say “any progress”—correct propositions about X and Y are correct even if they may seem trivial. And it sure would be a progress for someone who was forced to believe in dualism or worse as an alternative. And, to be clear, consciousness having a content is not a problem for casual closure—if some specific universe didn’t exist and some other universe existed instead, X and Y would be different. But yes, it’s a solution that is not especially useful except for a narrow purpose of solving the Hard Problem.
I feel like you’re angling for a position kinda like: “cosmopsychism explains why I have a conscious experience, but explains nothing whatsoever about any of the properties of that conscious experience”. Right?
Right. Well, if you stretch the definition of an explanation and properties, there are some vague intuition-like mental processes that I believe become streamlined when you accept cosmopsychism. Like, at the stage of “we have no idea how to solve the Hard Problem but I’m sure physicalism will win somehow” people still manage to hope for some kind of moral realism about consciousness, like there is objective fact that someone is in pain. But yeah, you may derive all this stuff from other sources too.
But, why do you think it’s insane? There are no philosophical problems with relation of some mental processes to memory. Science will explain it in the future just fine. “Why there’s conscious experience” always was the only mysterious problem about consciousness. And I’m not even saying that the Hard Problem and it’s solution is interesting, while practical theory of awareness is boring and useless. It’s just as the matter of fact under some reasonable definitions cosmopsychism solves the Hard Problem—that’s the extent of what I’m arguing.
then I reject that the thing you’re saying is actually the explanation of why there’s conscious experience.
The point is that cosmopsychism together with usual science provides the explanation you want. And no one doubts that science will do it’s part.
Not intentional—I’m just not sure whether you see problems with casual closure or with epistemic usefulness.
I wouldn’t say “any progress”—correct propositions about X and Y are correct even if they may seem trivial. And it sure would be a progress for someone who was forced to believe in dualism or worse as an alternative. And, to be clear, consciousness having a content is not a problem for casual closure—if some specific universe didn’t exist and some other universe existed instead, X and Y would be different. But yes, it’s a solution that is not especially useful except for a narrow purpose of solving the Hard Problem.
Right. Well, if you stretch the definition of an explanation and properties, there are some vague intuition-like mental processes that I believe become streamlined when you accept cosmopsychism. Like, at the stage of “we have no idea how to solve the Hard Problem but I’m sure physicalism will win somehow” people still manage to hope for some kind of moral realism about consciousness, like there is objective fact that someone is in pain. But yeah, you may derive all this stuff from other sources too.
But, why do you think it’s insane? There are no philosophical problems with relation of some mental processes to memory. Science will explain it in the future just fine. “Why there’s conscious experience” always was the only mysterious problem about consciousness. And I’m not even saying that the Hard Problem and it’s solution is interesting, while practical theory of awareness is boring and useless. It’s just as the matter of fact under some reasonable definitions cosmopsychism solves the Hard Problem—that’s the extent of what I’m arguing.
The point is that cosmopsychism together with usual science provides the explanation you want. And no one doubts that science will do it’s part.