Anything which is about “dissolving” the consciousness problem, rather than solving it, is a recipe for delusion. At least dualists understand that consciousness is real. At least the crypto-dualists who talk about “what it’s like to be a brain” understand that this “what-it’s-like” is unlike the description of the brain offered by the natural sciences—it’s an extra ontological feature they are forced to slyly posit, in order to accommodate the reality of consciousness.
If you don’t like either of those alternatives, you’d better become an idealist, or a neo-monist, or something new and unusual. Or you could just admit that you don’t have an answer. But so far as I can see, people who truly think the problem of consciousness is dissolved, would have to be functional solipsists oblivious to their own solipsism. They would still be conscious, a subject living in a world of objects, but they would believe there are no subjects anywhere, only objects. They would be subjects oblivious to their own subjecthood. They would treat the objects experienced or posited by their own subjectivity, as reality itself. They would exclude the knower from the known.
Perhaps there is some social value having certain people exist in this mindset. Maybe it helps them carry out important work, which they would be unable to do if they were troubled too much by questions about self and reality. But as an ideology for a technical subculture which took itself to be creating newer and better “minds”, it seems like a recipe for disaster.
I recommend Thomas Metzinger, The Ego Tunnel, to help dissolve the consciousness problem.
Anything which is about “dissolving” the consciousness problem, rather than solving it, is a recipe for delusion. At least dualists understand that consciousness is real. At least the crypto-dualists who talk about “what it’s like to be a brain” understand that this “what-it’s-like” is unlike the description of the brain offered by the natural sciences—it’s an extra ontological feature they are forced to slyly posit, in order to accommodate the reality of consciousness.
If you don’t like either of those alternatives, you’d better become an idealist, or a neo-monist, or something new and unusual. Or you could just admit that you don’t have an answer. But so far as I can see, people who truly think the problem of consciousness is dissolved, would have to be functional solipsists oblivious to their own solipsism. They would still be conscious, a subject living in a world of objects, but they would believe there are no subjects anywhere, only objects. They would be subjects oblivious to their own subjecthood. They would treat the objects experienced or posited by their own subjectivity, as reality itself. They would exclude the knower from the known.
Perhaps there is some social value having certain people exist in this mindset. Maybe it helps them carry out important work, which they would be unable to do if they were troubled too much by questions about self and reality. But as an ideology for a technical subculture which took itself to be creating newer and better “minds”, it seems like a recipe for disaster.