You aren’t just “data”, you are a particular being who persists in time. But you will never know this via “LessWrong philosophy” if the latter is understood as requiring that you presuppose physics, computation, a timeless multiverse, etc., in order to analyse anything. To get even just a glimpse of this truth, you have to notice that experienced reality involves realities like the existence of someone (you) who “knows” things and for whom time flows; and you may have to kick out certain habits of automatically substituting static abstractions for lived experience, whenever you want to think about reality.
Conceivably a “wrongosopher” could still arrive at such perspectives, if they had tuned into the parts of the Sequences that are about paying attention to the feelings of rightness and wrongness that accompany various thoughts, and if they had tuned out all the “scientistic” conceptual triumphalism that tramples over unscientific subjectivity. But since the habit of treating anything about consciousness that is odd from the perspective of scientific ontology, as just an illusion and/or a sort of computational annotation made by the brain, is very widespread, this hypothetical philosophical prodigy would have to be seeing past the everyday beliefs of contemporary scientific culture, and not just past the everyday beliefs of Less Wrong.
I believe he’s saying that we have conscious experience, that we have no explanation for it, and that we too easily fall into the fallacy of mistaking our confusion for evidence that it does not exist.
… you will never know this via “LessWrong philosophy” if the latter is understood as requiring that you presuppose physics, computation, a timeless multiverse, etc., in order to analyse anything.
You aren’t just “data”, you are a particular being who persists in time. But you will never know this via “LessWrong philosophy” if the latter is understood as requiring that you presuppose physics, computation, a timeless multiverse, etc., in order to analyse anything. To get even just a glimpse of this truth, you have to notice that experienced reality involves realities like the existence of someone (you) who “knows” things and for whom time flows; and you may have to kick out certain habits of automatically substituting static abstractions for lived experience, whenever you want to think about reality.
Conceivably a “wrongosopher” could still arrive at such perspectives, if they had tuned into the parts of the Sequences that are about paying attention to the feelings of rightness and wrongness that accompany various thoughts, and if they had tuned out all the “scientistic” conceptual triumphalism that tramples over unscientific subjectivity. But since the habit of treating anything about consciousness that is odd from the perspective of scientific ontology, as just an illusion and/or a sort of computational annotation made by the brain, is very widespread, this hypothetical philosophical prodigy would have to be seeing past the everyday beliefs of contemporary scientific culture, and not just past the everyday beliefs of Less Wrong.
I know what each of those words mean, but the amount of information I’m able to pull out of those two paragraphs is very low.
I believe he’s saying that we have conscious experience, that we have no explanation for it, and that we too easily fall into the fallacy of mistaking our confusion for evidence that it does not exist.
Good news! You don’t!