Haven’t heard about that one yet, thanks for point me to it :)
Hmm, I hoped that I clearly communicated that none of these views is satisfactory on its own. I believe that these are just possible ways of approaching the same matter. In this sense, we don’t disagree. Have I misunderstood your position?
Good catch, that was a leftover from an earlier draft. I fixed it now, thanks.
The interesting experience is quite warranted as Rob and I had a chat before I finished this post that definitely affected parts of it.
I think your opinion is a very fair assessment. Most theories, despite elegance or mathematical rigor, don't end up delivering useful tools for further analysis. I also feel that a lot of time is wasted on arguing over semantics since it is impossible not to be biased about your own subjective experience, so I intentionally left the definitions of "qualia" and "consciousness" as vague as possible while still useful. Maybe "illusionism" deserves the same treatment.
(Crosspost from my blog)
There are few academic lists of theories of consciousness (Doerig 2020) as well as some good blog post series about specific ideas (shout out to SelfAwarePatterns), but as far as I know, there is no casually approachable comprehensive list of current theories in a single post yet. Well, until now. "Consciousness" is used here in the intentionally vague way Thomas Nagel defined it, namely the way that it feels to be something. As with some other terms, any further definition already makes debatable assumptions, and since this is not a post about semantics, we will hold on to the easy, intuitive definitions. The term "theory" is used in a... (read 14627 more words →)
This is the reason why I think it is important to treat repeatable experiences that can be verified by others as evidence. Of course, this already assumes that the world and physics are exist, as well as other people.
Under this principle, your hands are verifiable. But your qualia of colors is not; only that you have some way of distinguishing wavelengths.