Eliezer, is this enlightenment or foil-seeking? You don’t seem to be addressing the strongest discussions of uncertainty regarding the subjective conscious experience, which is where the action should be in a blog community this relatively ingtelligent. It seems to me you’re looking for easy foils to slay, sort of like Dawkins, Hitchens, and Randi (and before them, Gould). I think that’s sucking up discussion oxygen here, and’ll end up driving away the more intelligent posters to other online venues. Worst case scenario, it’ll help dampen interesting discussion by smart people, like was done for years regarding the distribution and heritability of intelligence (in this case regarding the subjective conscious experience and discernment technology).
I disagree Hopefully Anonymous. Its important for Dawkins and Randi to address things like psychics and intelligent design, even though reasonably intelligent people could be talking about deeper things, because a lot of reasonably intelligent people still believe in them. There are a lot of well qualified philosophers (David Chalmers is even mentioned in the post) who believe this sort of thing and would probably very much like to have a discussion about it here.
It’s possible Eliezer’s rhetorical style is tripping you up (although if you’ve read much else of his it shouldn’t), but personally I think putting this argument in movie script form makes it much more accessible to lay-people. Sometimes intelligent discussion includes things other than finding the most plausible point in an opponents argument and attacking it with a detailed and well reasoned 10 page post.
Need it be one or the other? I was just reading Chalmers’s Singularity paper, came to the bit where he says, “Although I am sympathetic with some forms of dualism about consciousness,” and decided to reread this page. Which is hilarious.
Eliezer, is this enlightenment or foil-seeking? You don’t seem to be addressing the strongest discussions of uncertainty regarding the subjective conscious experience, which is where the action should be in a blog community this relatively ingtelligent. It seems to me you’re looking for easy foils to slay, sort of like Dawkins, Hitchens, and Randi (and before them, Gould). I think that’s sucking up discussion oxygen here, and’ll end up driving away the more intelligent posters to other online venues. Worst case scenario, it’ll help dampen interesting discussion by smart people, like was done for years regarding the distribution and heritability of intelligence (in this case regarding the subjective conscious experience and discernment technology).
I disagree Hopefully Anonymous. Its important for Dawkins and Randi to address things like psychics and intelligent design, even though reasonably intelligent people could be talking about deeper things, because a lot of reasonably intelligent people still believe in them. There are a lot of well qualified philosophers (David Chalmers is even mentioned in the post) who believe this sort of thing and would probably very much like to have a discussion about it here.
It’s possible Eliezer’s rhetorical style is tripping you up (although if you’ve read much else of his it shouldn’t), but personally I think putting this argument in movie script form makes it much more accessible to lay-people. Sometimes intelligent discussion includes things other than finding the most plausible point in an opponents argument and attacking it with a detailed and well reasoned 10 page post.
Need it be one or the other? I was just reading Chalmers’s Singularity paper, came to the bit where he says, “Although I am sympathetic with some forms of dualism about consciousness,” and decided to reread this page. Which is hilarious.