A creature isn’t conscious until there’s a brain with a concept of ‘consciousness’ that identifies it as such.
OK, so according to you, we have concepts existing before and independently of consciousness, and we also have that consciousness is not a property that is objectively present (or else there’d be no need to appeal to the conceptual judgement of a brain, as a necessary cause of consciousness’s existence). Both of these have to be true if you are to avoid circularity.
The second one already falsifies your account of consciousness. The difference between being conscious and not being conscious is not a matter of convention. It’s an internal fact about you which is not affected by whether I am around to express opinions.
It sounds like you want the consciousness of a brain to depend on the conceptual judgements of that same brain, which is at least less abjectly dependent on the epistemology of outsiders. But it’s still false. If you are conscious, you are conscious regardless of whatever opinions or concepts you have. Your conceptual capacities limit your possible conscious experience, in the sense that you can’t consciously identify something as an X if you don’t have the concept X, but whether or not you’re conscious doesn’t depend on how you are using (or misusing) your conceptual faculties at any time.
Just to clarify, by consciousness I mean awareness in all forms, not just self-awareness. What I said still applies to self-awareness as well as to awareness in general, but I thought I would make explicit that I’m not just talking about the sense of being a self. Even raw, self-oblivious sensory experience is a form of consciousness.
If these disembodied qualia-properties don’t help you make any actionable predictions beyond what physicalism could do, and their presence is unfalsifiable, I can’t see any point to this debate. Is it a social-signaling contest of some sort?
Maybe my very latest comments will clear things up a little. The immediate problem with physicalism is that reality contains qualia and physicalism doesn’t. In a reformed physicalism that does contain qualia, they would have causal power.
Just to clarify, by consciousness I mean awareness in all forms, not just self-awareness. What I said still applies to self-awareness as well as to awareness in general, but I thought I would make explicit that I’m not just talking about the sense of being a self.
Ah, so we’re arguing over definitions.
The immediate problem with physicalism is that reality contains qualia and physicalism doesn’t. In a reformed physicalism that does contain qualia, they would have causal power.
Let’s say you take an organism capable of receiving and interpreting information in the form of light, such as e.g. a ferret with working eyes and a visual cortex. Duplicate it with arbitrary precision, keep one of the copies in a totally lightless box for a few minutes and shine a dazzling but nondamaging spotlight on the other for the same period of time. Then open the box, shut off the spotlight, and show them both a picture.
The ferret from the box would see blindingly intense light, gradually fading in to the picture, which would seem bright and vivid. The ferret from the spotlight would see near-total darkness, gradually fading in to the picture, which would seem dull and blurry. Same picture, very different subjective experience, but it’s all the result of physiological (mostly neurological) processes that can be adequately explained by physicalism.
Does the theory of qualia make independently-verifiable predictions that physicalism cannot? Or, if the predictions are the same, is it somehow simpler to describe mathematically? In the absence of either of those conditions, I am forced to consider the theory of qualia needlessly complex.
Let’s go back to your original statement:
OK, so according to you, we have concepts existing before and independently of consciousness, and we also have that consciousness is not a property that is objectively present (or else there’d be no need to appeal to the conceptual judgement of a brain, as a necessary cause of consciousness’s existence). Both of these have to be true if you are to avoid circularity.
The second one already falsifies your account of consciousness. The difference between being conscious and not being conscious is not a matter of convention. It’s an internal fact about you which is not affected by whether I am around to express opinions.
It sounds like you want the consciousness of a brain to depend on the conceptual judgements of that same brain, which is at least less abjectly dependent on the epistemology of outsiders. But it’s still false. If you are conscious, you are conscious regardless of whatever opinions or concepts you have. Your conceptual capacities limit your possible conscious experience, in the sense that you can’t consciously identify something as an X if you don’t have the concept X, but whether or not you’re conscious doesn’t depend on how you are using (or misusing) your conceptual faculties at any time.
Just to clarify, by consciousness I mean awareness in all forms, not just self-awareness. What I said still applies to self-awareness as well as to awareness in general, but I thought I would make explicit that I’m not just talking about the sense of being a self. Even raw, self-oblivious sensory experience is a form of consciousness.
Maybe my very latest comments will clear things up a little. The immediate problem with physicalism is that reality contains qualia and physicalism doesn’t. In a reformed physicalism that does contain qualia, they would have causal power.
Ah, so we’re arguing over definitions.
Let’s say you take an organism capable of receiving and interpreting information in the form of light, such as e.g. a ferret with working eyes and a visual cortex. Duplicate it with arbitrary precision, keep one of the copies in a totally lightless box for a few minutes and shine a dazzling but nondamaging spotlight on the other for the same period of time. Then open the box, shut off the spotlight, and show them both a picture.
The ferret from the box would see blindingly intense light, gradually fading in to the picture, which would seem bright and vivid. The ferret from the spotlight would see near-total darkness, gradually fading in to the picture, which would seem dull and blurry. Same picture, very different subjective experience, but it’s all the result of physiological (mostly neurological) processes that can be adequately explained by physicalism.
Does the theory of qualia make independently-verifiable predictions that physicalism cannot? Or, if the predictions are the same, is it somehow simpler to describe mathematically? In the absence of either of those conditions, I am forced to consider the theory of qualia needlessly complex.