Remark: When talking about consciousness, adherence to physicalism is necessary. Information is fundamentally physical (refer to papers by R Landauer and D Deutsch).
If everything is physical , information is physical. There’s no argument for information being solely physical that doesn’t assume physicalism.
There is nothing magical about information, emotions, intuitions and consciousness.
Magic is a poorly defined term, but it is not the case that all these things are well understood—particularly the phenomenal aspect of emotion.
They all obey the laws of physics. DHCA is hard evidence against the existence of an immaterial soul that leaves the body after death:
Fully detachable souls are not the only non-physicalist theory
Calling something we do not yet understand ‘emergent’ doesn’t help us understand it any better than saying nothing.
It excludes detachable soul theory, and pure idealism, if nothing else, so it has some information.
Trying to explain consciousness via introspection is like trying to explain how Google works by doing Google searches
Ignoring introspective evidence amounts to ignoring the single most central feature of consciousness, and focussing on side-issues instead.
Taking introspective evidence seriously does not amount to taking it as incorrigible, and so does not beg the question against physicalism or illusionism.
Can you imagine an A380 flying backwards? Of course you can. Just imagine a large plane in the air, moving backwards. Is such a scenario really conceivable? Well, the more you know about aerodynamics and aeronautical engineering, the less conceivable it becomes. It just cannot be done.
Seth follows this up with a knock-down argument against Chalmers’ philosophical zombies:
In one sense it’s trivial to imagine a philosophical zombie. I just picture a version of myself wandering around without having any conscious experiences. But can I really conceive this? What I’m being asked to do, really, is to consider the capabilities and limitations of a vast network of many billions of neurons and gazillions of synapses (the connections between neurons), not to mention glial cells and neurotransmitter gradients and other such neurobiological goodies, all wrapped into a body interacting with a world which includes other brains in other bodies. Can I do this? Can anyone do this? I doubt it.
That’s a disanalogous analogy. In the first case, we cant imagine the plane flying backwards in terms of our knowledge of aerodynamics, because aerodynamics makes it impossible; in the second case, we don’t have a theory that makes it inevitable that neural activity must be accompanied by phenomenal consciousness—such a theory would be an answer to the hard problem.
If everything is physical , information is physical. There’s no argument for information being solely physical that doesn’t assume physicalism.
Magic is a poorly defined term, but it is not the case that all these things are well understood—particularly the phenomenal aspect of emotion.
Fully detachable souls are not the only non-physicalist theory
It excludes detachable soul theory, and pure idealism, if nothing else, so it has some information.
Ignoring introspective evidence amounts to ignoring the single most central feature of consciousness, and focussing on side-issues instead.
Taking introspective evidence seriously does not amount to taking it as incorrigible, and so does not beg the question against physicalism or illusionism.
That’s a disanalogous analogy. In the first case, we cant imagine the plane flying backwards in terms of our knowledge of aerodynamics, because aerodynamics makes it impossible; in the second case, we don’t have a theory that makes it inevitable that neural activity must be accompanied by phenomenal consciousness—such a theory would be an answer to the hard problem.