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torekp comments on Physicalism: consciousness as the last sense - Less Wrong
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To anyone who really suffers from doubt about the physical nature of consciousness (...only sometimes, and I'm not proud of it) this line of thinking is pretty exasperating. Yes, the easy problem is easy, and most responsible dualists are happy enough admitting that the mind operates through physical means detectable on an MRI and we gain information about our own mental states through physical neural function...
...none of which makes any difference to the question that non-physicalists actually worry about, the so-called hard problem. Even calling consciousness a "sense" is admitting the lack of a solution to the hard problem: senses are the modalities by which objects are perceived. So our inner states are the objects, consciousness is the modality, and then who's doing the perceiving? More consciousness? Who's perceiving that? Hofstadter's solution of the strange loop is interesting but so nontechnical as to be useless.
Calling consciousness a sense, insofar as it's not just an equivocation on the term "consciousness", passes the recursive buck. The subjective level at which the senses bottom out remains just as poorly understood as before. This is more of an argument that thinking is purely physical (and a good one). I'm hoping you'll get to what I think of as "consciousness" later on in the series.
On the other hand, thanks for that link to the voice recording made in 1860. Getting to hear the oldest accessible human sound in the world? Pretty neat.
You made this point in a previous post, I think. Not that I'm complaining - it's well worth the emphasis.
But it lays the groundwork, I think. Comparing our grasp of the same object via different senses reminds us that we have different ways of apprehending a single item. Comparing our grasp of the same property via different senses would be even more instructive. Consider visual and tactile assessments of linearity. We consider these to be two ways of apprehending the same property. But it is just barely conceivable that we are wrong. Conceivably - although not with enough probability to warrant revising the way we now talk and think about linearity - future discoveries will lead us to separate linear(tactile) from linear(visual).
This is important to the "hard problem" because many non-physicalists have argued from the premise that there will always be a conceptual gap between physical and mental descriptions, to the conclusion that these descriptions pick out different properties. "Conceptual gap" here meaning just that is is conceivable that one description could apply and the other not apply. The premise, I think, is true, but the inference is invalid. Linearity is a single property that we can pick out with two concepts, tactile linearity and visual linearity, that have a (very thin - but that's all we need!) conceptual gap between them. Linearity is therefore a counterexample to the alleged inference principle.