Vaniver comments on By Which It May Be Judged - LessWrong

35 Post author: Eliezer_Yudkowsky 10 December 2012 04:26AM

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Comment author: CronoDAS 12 December 2012 05:09:02AM *  0 points [-]

It's impossible to express a sentence like this after having fully appreciated the nature of the Hard Problem. In fact, whether you're a dualist or a physicalist, I think a good litmus test for whether you've grasped just how hard the Hard Problem is is whether you see how categorically different the vitalism case is from the dualism case. See: Chalmers, Consciousness and its Place in Nature.

::follows link::

Call me the Type-C Materialist subspecies of eliminativist, then. I think that a sufficient understanding of the brain will make the solution obvious; the reason we don't have a "functional" explanation of subjective experience is not because the solution doesn't exist, but that we don't know how to do it.

Van Gulick (1993) suggests that conceivability arguments are question-begging, since once we have a good explanation of consciousness, zombies and the like will no longer be conceivable.

This is where I think we'll end up.