What I’m going to say is that I really do mean phenomenal consciousness. The person who turns off the alarm not realizing it’s an alarm, poking at the loud thing without understanding it, is already so different from my waking self. And those are just the ones that I remember—the shape of the middle of the distribution implies the existence of an unremembered tail of the distribution.
If I’m sleeping dreamlessly, and take a reflexive action such as getting goosebumps, am I having a kinesthetic experience? If you say yes here, then perhaps there is no mystery and you just use ‘experience’ idiosyncratically.
Hmm I guess I gave your original comment too shallow a reading, apologies for that.
So to be clear, are you saying that, if a half-awake version of you looks at a button saying “I am conscious”, thinks to themselves “am I conscious? Yes I am!”, and presses the button, whether or not that half-awake version was actually correct with that introspection is up to interpretation? In other words, you don’t trust the report of your half-awake self?
My instinct is to say something like: if your half-awake self is actually capable of introspecting on their experience in the same way as your awake self is, and has enough executive function to translate that decision into whether or not to press the button, then I would trust their report. But yea, this does tug on my intuition a little bit for sure.
What I’m going to say is that I really do mean phenomenal consciousness. The person who turns off the alarm not realizing it’s an alarm, poking at the loud thing without understanding it, is already so different from my waking self. And those are just the ones that I remember—the shape of the middle of the distribution implies the existence of an unremembered tail of the distribution.
If I’m sleeping dreamlessly, and take a reflexive action such as getting goosebumps, am I having a kinesthetic experience? If you say yes here, then perhaps there is no mystery and you just use ‘experience’ idiosyncratically.
Hmm I guess I gave your original comment too shallow a reading, apologies for that.
So to be clear, are you saying that, if a half-awake version of you looks at a button saying “I am conscious”, thinks to themselves “am I conscious? Yes I am!”, and presses the button, whether or not that half-awake version was actually correct with that introspection is up to interpretation? In other words, you don’t trust the report of your half-awake self?
My instinct is to say something like: if your half-awake self is actually capable of introspecting on their experience in the same way as your awake self is, and has enough executive function to translate that decision into whether or not to press the button, then I would trust their report. But yea, this does tug on my intuition a little bit for sure.