I wonder if the same mechanisms could be invovled in conspiracy theorists. Their way of thinking seems very similar. I also suspect a reinforcement mechanism: it becomes more and more difficult for the subject to deny his own beliefs, as it would require abandonning large parts of his present (and coherent) belief system, leaving him with almost nothing left.

This could explain why patients are reluctant to accept alternative versions afterwards (such as "you have a brain damage").

When you think you're imagining a p-zombie, all that's happening is that you're imagining an ordinary person and neglecting to imagine their experiences, rather than (impossibly) imagining the absence of any experience. (You can tell yourself "this person has no experiences" and then it will be true in your model that HasNoExperiences(ThisPerson) but there's no necessary reason why a predicate called "HasNoExperiences" must track whether or not people have experiences.)

This is an interesting proposal, but we might ask why, if consciousness is not really distinct from the physical properties, is it so easy to imagine the physical properties without imagining consciousness? It's not like we can imagine a microphysical duplicate of our world that's lacking chairs. Once we've imagined the atoms-arranged-chairwise, that's all it is to be a chair. It's analytic. But there's no such conceptual connection between neurons-instantiating-computations and consciousness, which arguably precludes identifying the two.

The philosophers I study under criticise the sciences for not being rigorous enough.

Acid test 1: Are they complaining about experimenters using arbitrary subjective "statistical significance" measures instead of Bayesian likelihood functions?

Acid test 2: Are they chiding physicists for not decisively discarding single-world interpretations of quantum mechanics?

Acid test 3: Are all of their own journals open-access?

It may be ad hominem tu quoque, but any discipline that doesn't pass the three acid tests has not impressed me with its superiority to our modern, massively flawed academic science.

lukeprog wrote "philosophers are 'spectacularly bad' at understanding that their intuitions are generated by cognitive algorithms." I am pretty confident that minds are physical/chemical systems, and that intuitions are generated by cognitive algorithms. (Furthermore, many of the alternatives I know of are so bizarre that given that such an alternative is the true reality of my universe, the conditional probability that rationality or philosophy is going to do me any good seems to be low.) But philosophy as often practiced values questioning everything, and so I don't think it's quite fair to expect philosophers to "understand" this (which I read in this context as synonymous as "take this for granted"). I'd prefer a formulation like "spectacularly bad at seriously addressing [or, perhaps, even properly understanding] the obvious hypothesis that their intuitions are generated by cognitive algorithms." It seems to me that the criticism rewritten in this form remains severe.

Unfortunately, many important problems are fundamentally philosophical problems. Philosophy itself is unavoidable.

Isn't this true just because the way philosophy is effectively defined? It's a catch-all category for poorly understood problems which have nothing in common except that they aren't properly investigated by some branch of science. Once a real question is answered, it no longer feels like a philosophical question; today philosophers don't investigate motion of celestial bodies or structure of matter any more.

In other words, I wonder what are the fundamentally philosophical questions. The adverb fundamentally creates the impression that those questions will be still regarded as philosophical after being uncontroversially answered, which I doubt will ever happen.

Evidently.

You confusing experience itself with your intuitions about experience. Your actual experience makes just as much sense if you perceive yourself to be part of a great tree of branches.

It does not explain why we followed that path in the many world, not another one.

It doesn't explain that because that isn't what happened.

You're right, there is no certainty, but my jumps are not totally ungrounded. We all experience a flow of time in a single world, and the many-worlds interpretion does not really explains it.

It really does. At the level of everyday life branching explains our experiences exactly as well as a non-quantum explanation. When we happen to be using scientific apparatus our experience is better explained by MW.