Sure you can, if you’re an epiphenomenalist. (Am I right that you’ve been advocating that position, though you may not hold it?)
Yes, that’s more or less what I’ve been advocating. (The funny thing is that I don’t even have a clear position of my own...)
Regarding consciousness without experience, in what sense is it consciousness then? I’d call it an unconscious but highly intelligent agent—perhaps the AIs we’ll build will be such.
I suspect that there might be some sort of personality disposition to be more or less willing to claim to experience experience, to feel the immediacy of consciousness. Something analogous to the conservative/liberal divide. If that’s true, then making claims like the quoted one is just the mind projection fallacy.
A very good idea, and a possible explanation for many disagreements. It’d be just like the known cases of people disagreeing about whether thinking necessarily involved visual mental images, or whether human thinking necessarily involves “talking to oneself” using sound processing circuitry.
The “experience experience” of those who do report it still has to be explained to their satisfaction. Those who don’t experience it as vividly just tend to shrug it off as not important or not real or a cultural delusion of some sort.
Yes, that’s more or less what I’ve been advocating. (The funny thing is that I don’t even have a clear position of my own...)
Regarding consciousness without experience, in what sense is it consciousness then? I’d call it an unconscious but highly intelligent agent—perhaps the AIs we’ll build will be such.
A very good idea, and a possible explanation for many disagreements. It’d be just like the known cases of people disagreeing about whether thinking necessarily involved visual mental images, or whether human thinking necessarily involves “talking to oneself” using sound processing circuitry.
The “experience experience” of those who do report it still has to be explained to their satisfaction. Those who don’t experience it as vividly just tend to shrug it off as not important or not real or a cultural delusion of some sort.