See John Searle’s Chinese room argument. Or don’t. It defines consciousness as an impossible uncategory, arguing that anything that can be understood obviously can’t be conscious.
That doesnt oviously fulfill the two criteria of categoreal problermaticness you mentioned above—necessary emptiness, and unobservability. It seems that you are implicitly adding a third criterion of Incomprehensibility. But, as a naturalist, you dont have a guarantee that everything is comprehnsible to your monkey brain, including your bain itself.
The other two citeria are problematic as well. Observability? I’ve met people who disbelieve in matter because it..apart from its properties and behavioiur..is unobservable.
The instruction to read Searle’s Minds and Machines is puzzling. For one thing it is about semantics , not consciousness.And it is supposed to weigh against computational semantics, or maybe consciousness, if that is an adequate synonym for sematics.
..and you seem to be arguing for a reductionistic undestanding of consciousness, not a computational one, which is something much more specific.
..and reductionism is tricky. If you understand things by breaking them down into components, you are going to end up with ultimate components you don’t understand. But you object to incomprehensible categories, or categories of the incomprehesible, or something.
. ..and consciousness is tricky. If you go around telling people that cosnciousness is computation, dont be surprised if they ask you how to code SeeRed().
That doesnt oviously fulfill the two criteria of categoreal problermaticness you mentioned above—necessary emptiness, and unobservability. It seems that you are implicitly adding a third criterion of Incomprehensibility. But, as a naturalist, you dont have a guarantee that everything is comprehnsible to your monkey brain, including your bain itself.
The other two citeria are problematic as well. Observability? I’ve met people who disbelieve in matter because it..apart from its properties and behavioiur..is unobservable.
The instruction to read Searle’s Minds and Machines is puzzling. For one thing it is about semantics , not consciousness.And it is supposed to weigh against computational semantics, or maybe consciousness, if that is an adequate synonym for sematics.
..and you seem to be arguing for a reductionistic undestanding of consciousness, not a computational one, which is something much more specific.
..and reductionism is tricky. If you understand things by breaking them down into components, you are going to end up with ultimate components you don’t understand. But you object to incomprehensible categories, or categories of the incomprehesible, or something.
. ..and consciousness is tricky. If you go around telling people that cosnciousness is computation, dont be surprised if they ask you how to code SeeRed().