Aesthetic judgements switch at the drop of a news cycle, or the newest gadget, or supposed slight from a passer-by; — Mww
discursive judgements are bound by the knowledge relative to the times. — Mww
Wouldn’t matter either way; it’s beside the point. — Mww
Of course they do. Aesthetic judgements switch at the drop of a news cycle, or the newest gadget, or supposed slight from a passer-by; discursive judgements are bound by the knowledge relative to the times. Two different kinds of cycles of independent change. — Mww
Of course , I didn’t have in mind trivial aesthetic judgements , but the range of artistic expressions that you will likely to find if you walk into your local modern art museum or gallery. If you talk to those artists, you will find all sorts of complex underlying assumptions they share with the larger scientific community and which inform and direct their work. — Joshs
Consciousness is real. Of course it is. We experience it every day. But for Daniel Dennett, consciousness is no more real than the screen on your laptop or your phone.
The geeks who make electronic devices call what we see on our screens the "user illusion". It's a bit patronising, perhaps, but they've got a point.
Pressing icons on our phones makes us feel in control. We feel in charge of the hardware inside. But what we do with our fingers on our phones is a rather pathetic contribution to the sum total of phone activity. And, of course, it tells us absolutely nothing about how they work.
Human consciousness is the same, says Dennett. "It's the brain's 'user illusion' of itself," he says.
It feels real and important to us but it just isn't a very big deal.
"The brain doesn't have to understand how the brain works". — BBC
I don't believe we have to justify the way we express ourselves. How does one go about doing that? :yikes:By granting it, you are going to have to justify why you are using the (now) technical word "consciousness" to mean something else besides the usual meaning of the word. — Manuel
There are also different ordinary definitions of consciousness. Do we also need justification for one definition over the other?If you can't do that, then I don't see why we should use a technical definition, because it doesn't modify on our usual way of using the word, so it doesn't really serve a purpose. — Manuel
I don't believe we have to justify the way we express ourselves. How does one go about doing that? — Wheatley
There are also different ordinary definitions of consciousness. Do we also need justification for one definition over the other? — Wheatley
Strawson's assertion that Dennett really thinks we are all zombies is not accurate — Janus
“I’m a robot, and you’re a robot, but that doesn't make us any less dignified or wonderful or lovable or responsible for our actions,” he said. “Why does our dignity depend on our being scientifically inexplicable?”
Given his broadly functionalist model of consciousness, he argues, we can see why the ‘putative contrast between zombies and conscious beings is illusory’ — Janus
in other words to claim that he believes Zombies are really possible, and that we are all zombies — Janus
to mean in the sense of being conscious that we intuitively ( and by implication, naively) believe in, and of course there is no problem accepting that is Dennett's view, since he explicitly endorses it.. — Janus
It's true, but the fact that it's true won't make any difference to those who wish not to accept it. — Wayfarer
We had a thread on Strawson's panpsychism a little while back, which I'm also highly sceptical of. — Wayfarer
My position is very simple - mind is real and immaterial. Therefore materialism is false. — Wayfarer
OK then, if not zombies, how about robots? — Wayfarer
Just as naive realism is prereflectively common, so it goes with naive idealism too. — Janus
We have a special spark of life that makes us not-horrifically-uncanny to each other. — theRiddler
----Dennett summarized his position in an interview in The New York Times
in 2013: 'The elusive subjective conscious experience - the redness of red, the painfulness of pain - that philosophers call qualia? Sheer illusion.'
I don't think Dennett means we are robots i — Janus
hmm... This seems very similar to the discussion I had with @Banno earlier. https://thephilosophyforum.com/discussion/comment/607745 I guess it's just a matter of discussing philosophy the right way. (conduct? :chin: ) Thanks for your time. :smile:Not for every single word. That would take forever an be pointless. No, in philosophy we try to clarify or elucidate the phenomenon in question: free will, idealism, compatibilism, psychic continuity, etc.
That's why we have these topics being discussed, we want to understand them better. — Manuel
I don't think Dennett means we are robots i — Janus
You don't think Dennett means anything he says, because if you thought he did mean anything he actually says, then you would flee screaming from it. :lol:
Make no mistake - Dennett seems a nice person, civil, educated, and so on, but his "philosophy" so called is utterly soul-destroying and a symptom of "the decline of the West". — Wayfarer
I actually addressed TheMadFool because he or she repeated that same strawman attributed to Dennett. — Janus
Dennett went on record to say that consciousness is an illusion. I find that interesting by the way. It gets my juices flowing, not that I have anything to show for it. — TheMadFool
And I say I’m not the one misunderstanding him. I’ll leave it there except for this review. — Wayfarer
Dennett went on record to say that consciousness is an illusion. — TheMadFool
Not that this is very surprising. After five decades, it would be astonishing if Dennett were to change direction now. But, by the same token, his project should over that time have acquired not only more complexity, but greater sophistication. And yet it has not. For instance, he still thinks it a solvent critique of Cartesianism to say that interactions between bodies and minds would violate the laws of physics. Apart from involving a particularly doctrinaire view of the causal closure of the physical (the positively Laplacian fantasy that all physical events constitute an inviolable continuum of purely physical causes), this argument clumsily assumes that such an interaction would constitute simply another mechanical exchange of energy in addition to material forces. — David Bentley Hart
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