Honestly, I can’t hold it against anyone who bounces off the piece. It’s long, dense, and, let’s face it — it proposes something intense, even borderline unpalatable at first glance.
If I encountered it cold, I can imagine myself reacting the same way: “This is pseudoscientific nonsense.” Maybe I wouldn’t even finish reading it before forming that judgment.
And that’s kind of the point, or at least part of the irony: the argument deals precisely with the limits of self-modeling systems, and how they generate intuitions (like “of course experience is real”) that feel indubitable because of structural constraints. So naturally, a theory that denies the ground of those intuitions will feel like it’s violating common sense — or worse, wasting your time.
Still, I’d invite anyone curious to read it less as a metaphysical claim and more as a kind of formal diagnosis — not “you’re wrong to believe in qualia,” but “you’re structurally unable to verify them, and that’s why they feel so real.”
If it’s wrong, I want to know how. But if it just feels wrong, that might be a clue that it’s touching the very boundary it’s trying to illuminate.
Honestly, I can’t hold it against anyone who bounces off the piece. It’s long, dense, and, let’s face it — it proposes something intense, even borderline unpalatable at first glance.
If I encountered it cold, I can imagine myself reacting the same way: “This is pseudoscientific nonsense.” Maybe I wouldn’t even finish reading it before forming that judgment.
And that’s kind of the point, or at least part of the irony: the argument deals precisely with the limits of self-modeling systems, and how they generate intuitions (like “of course experience is real”) that feel indubitable because of structural constraints. So naturally, a theory that denies the ground of those intuitions will feel like it’s violating common sense — or worse, wasting your time.
Still, I’d invite anyone curious to read it less as a metaphysical claim and more as a kind of formal diagnosis — not “you’re wrong to believe in qualia,” but “you’re structurally unable to verify them, and that’s why they feel so real.”
If it’s wrong, I want to know how. But if it just feels wrong, that might be a clue that it’s touching the very boundary it’s trying to illuminate.