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Nisan comments on Open Thread: May 2010, Part 2 - Less Wrong
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WRT some recent posts on consciousness, mostly by Academician, eg "There must be something more":
There are 3 popular stances on consciousness:
Consciousness is spiritual, non-physical.
Consciousness can be explained by materialism.
Consciousness does not exist. (How I characterize the Dennett position.)
Suppose you provide a complete, materialistic account of how a human behaves, that explains every detail of how sensory stimuli are translated into beliefs and actions. A person holding position 2 will say, "Okay, but you still need to explain consciousness." A person holding position 3 denies that there's anything more to be explained.
I've found these posts perplexing, and I think this is why: What's happening is that someone who holds position 3 is arguing against position 2 by characterizing it as position 1.
Is (3) the only one that is compatible with a computational theory of mind?
(2) is too, if consciousness is defined such that it is either an epiphenomenon of other mental processes or a specific, well-defined feature that is necessary to certain things human minds do. (I take the latter position: consciousness does something (a mind without it wouldn't act the same, without intentionally imitating it) and there is no reason to expect it will not be compatible with materialism.)