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timtyler comments on Dennett's heterophenomenology - Less Wrong
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Comments (23)
Perhaps it would be instructive to think for a moment about why these people, who probably experience the world just as well as you do, have come to accept proposed explanations of consciousness.
It would also be nice if you'd engage these proposed explanations instead of saying that anyone who disagrees is in denial.
Dennet clearly thinks a lot about why other people think that qualia are real things that must be explained. He also makes it a point of engaging these intuitions and showing that they often fall apart under scrutiny rather than assuming that somehow they all must be correct.
The only proposed explanation of consciousness I've seen on Less Wrong is "maybe if we arrange stuff in the right way, consciousness will happen". Even if true, it's not enough of an explanation to enable argument about it.
Dennett presents a resolutely functionalist description of experience, then tells us that nothing resembling qualia can be found within it, to the great surprise of no-one at all.
To believe that the phenomenal world, the world you actually live in, is a fiction, while an invented "physical" world, for which no evidence exists, is the real world, is not merely wrong, it's an irrationality which makes a complete mockery of the goals of this website.
There is evidence that the "real" world exists, for most reasonable uses of the term "evidence".
Evidence implies observation. Observation implies conscious experience. So your evidence for a world independent of conscious experience turns out to be ... conscious experience. I expect you can see why that isn't going to work.
No, I can't. Conscious experience is our evidence for the existence of the real world.
The hypothesis that the real world exists seems favoured heavily by Occam's razor.
If there was no world out there, life would probably be a lot more like dreaming is.
In what sense does this "not work"? All of modern technology was designed and constructed under the paradigm that there is a world independent of conscious experience - the competing framework has produced bupkis.