But conscious states are strongly determined by brain states as far as we can check. The argument that people use to argue against fully identifying the two comes down to deriving the metaphysical nature of qualia from their phenomenological properties. It seems to me that is epistemically problematic to argue against objective claims with intuition about something that we cannot even contrast with anything. We just have our intuition about phenomenology, no conceivable way to track the processes behind the phenomenon from that intuition. This is the reason why people imagine qualia to be individual entities and then think they can remove them ceteris paribus, or that they can’t be tracked by Laplace’s demons.
Consciousness doesn’t need to be fundamentally distinct from non-consciousness. Rocks can’t monitor their own states at all, but computers can, that doesn’t mean that a fundamentally new property was added when you turn a rock into a computer. If we stop trying to derive metaphysics from phenomenology, the same account can be applied to consciousness. Then whatever processes track with what we feel consciousness to be will be trackable by a Laplace demon.
“But conscious states are strongly determined by brain states as far as we can check”
You can only “check” your own mental states, so that is not very far.
“Consciousness doesn’t need to be fundamentally distinct from non-consciousness”
I cannot argue against eliminativism, because perhaps you are nos conscious. Still, I would not eat you because of cultural taboos and legal complications...but no longer for moral reasons! :-)
As commented in the article, this philosopher is conscious for sure, but the regarding the gentle reader, he only can hope. Not even the Laplace demon would know, and my phenomenic knowledge is vastly inferior.
But conscious states are strongly determined by brain states as far as we can check. The argument that people use to argue against fully identifying the two comes down to deriving the metaphysical nature of qualia from their phenomenological properties. It seems to me that is epistemically problematic to argue against objective claims with intuition about something that we cannot even contrast with anything. We just have our intuition about phenomenology, no conceivable way to track the processes behind the phenomenon from that intuition. This is the reason why people imagine qualia to be individual entities and then think they can remove them ceteris paribus, or that they can’t be tracked by Laplace’s demons.
Consciousness doesn’t need to be fundamentally distinct from non-consciousness. Rocks can’t monitor their own states at all, but computers can, that doesn’t mean that a fundamentally new property was added when you turn a rock into a computer. If we stop trying to derive metaphysics from phenomenology, the same account can be applied to consciousness. Then whatever processes track with what we feel consciousness to be will be trackable by a Laplace demon.
“But conscious states are strongly determined by brain states as far as we can check”
You can only “check” your own mental states, so that is not very far.
“Consciousness doesn’t need to be fundamentally distinct from non-consciousness”
I cannot argue against eliminativism, because perhaps you are nos conscious. Still, I would not eat you because of cultural taboos and legal complications...but no longer for moral reasons! :-)
As commented in the article, this philosopher is conscious for sure, but the regarding the gentle reader, he only can hope. Not even the Laplace demon would know, and my phenomenic knowledge is vastly inferior.
Consciousness not being fundamental doesn’t equal consciousness not existing.