Mitchell, Unknown, I worry you may have misunderstood the point.
The question “Why am I conscious?” is not meant to be isomorphic to the question “Why do I think I’m conscious?” It’s just that the latter question is guaranteed to be answerable, whether or not the first question contains an inherent confusion; and that the second question, if fully answered, is guaranteed to contain whatever information you were hoping to get out of the first question.
“Explain” is a recursive option—whenever you find an answer, you can hit “Explain” again, unless you hit “Worship” or “Ignore” instead. If the answer to “Why do I think I’m conscious?” is “Because I’m conscious”; and you can show that this is true evidence (that is, you would not think you were conscious if you were not conscious); and you carry out this demonstration without reference to any mysterious concepts (i.e., “Because I directly experience qualia!” contains four mysterious concepts, not counting “Because”); then you could hit the “Explain” button again regarding “Because I’m conscious.”
The point is that by starting with a belief, you start with an unconfused thing—the belief may be about something confused, but the belief itself is just a cognitive object sitting there in your mind. Even if its meaning is self-contradictory, the representation is just a representation. “This sentence is false” is paradoxical when you try to interpret it, but there is nothing paradoxical about writing four English words between quote marks, it happens all the time.
If you’re asking “Why is the sentence ‘This sentence is false’ both true and false?” you’ll end up confused, because you dereferenced it in the question, and the referent is self-contradictory. Ask “Why do I think the sentence ‘This sentence is false’ is both true and false?” and you’ll be able to see how your mind, as an interpreter, goes into an infinite loop—suggesting that not every syntactical English sentence refers to a proposition.
By starting with a belief, un-derefenced, inside quote marks, you start with an unconfused thing—a cognitive representation. Then you keep tracing back the chain of causality until you arrive at something confusing. Then you unconfuse it. Then you keep tracing.
It really does help to start with something unconfused.
Unknown said: So there is an actually unanswerable question (at least as far as anyone knows, by any concepts anyone has yet conceived of), and it is not a meaningless question.
1) No one knows what science doesn’t know.
2) Perhaps you should ask “Why do I think this question is unanswerable?” rather than “Why is this question unanswerable?”
This sort of anthropomorphic bias leads to conceptual errors. ‘Science’ is the method of acquiring knowledge and the collection of acquired knowledge to which the method is rigorously applied. It is incapable of knowing anything independently of what individuals know; in fact, it can’t know anything at all without some knowing individual to practice it. And to be sure, we can know things ‘science doesn’t know’: we know we are in love, that we are happy or sad, that we played baseball for the first time when we were 6 years old at the park in Glens Falls, etc.
Mitchell, Unknown, I worry you may have misunderstood the point.
The question “Why am I conscious?” is not meant to be isomorphic to the question “Why do I think I’m conscious?” It’s just that the latter question is guaranteed to be answerable, whether or not the first question contains an inherent confusion; and that the second question, if fully answered, is guaranteed to contain whatever information you were hoping to get out of the first question.
“Explain” is a recursive option—whenever you find an answer, you can hit “Explain” again, unless you hit “Worship” or “Ignore” instead. If the answer to “Why do I think I’m conscious?” is “Because I’m conscious”; and you can show that this is true evidence (that is, you would not think you were conscious if you were not conscious); and you carry out this demonstration without reference to any mysterious concepts (i.e., “Because I directly experience qualia!” contains four mysterious concepts, not counting “Because”); then you could hit the “Explain” button again regarding “Because I’m conscious.”
The point is that by starting with a belief, you start with an unconfused thing—the belief may be about something confused, but the belief itself is just a cognitive object sitting there in your mind. Even if its meaning is self-contradictory, the representation is just a representation. “This sentence is false” is paradoxical when you try to interpret it, but there is nothing paradoxical about writing four English words between quote marks, it happens all the time.
If you’re asking “Why is the sentence ‘This sentence is false’ both true and false?” you’ll end up confused, because you dereferenced it in the question, and the referent is self-contradictory. Ask “Why do I think the sentence ‘This sentence is false’ is both true and false?” and you’ll be able to see how your mind, as an interpreter, goes into an infinite loop—suggesting that not every syntactical English sentence refers to a proposition.
By starting with a belief, un-derefenced, inside quote marks, you start with an unconfused thing—a cognitive representation. Then you keep tracing back the chain of causality until you arrive at something confusing. Then you unconfuse it. Then you keep tracing.
It really does help to start with something unconfused.
Unknown said: So there is an actually unanswerable question (at least as far as anyone knows, by any concepts anyone has yet conceived of), and it is not a meaningless question.
1) No one knows what science doesn’t know.
2) Perhaps you should ask “Why do I think this question is unanswerable?” rather than “Why is this question unanswerable?”
“No one knows what science doesn’t know.”
This sort of anthropomorphic bias leads to conceptual errors. ‘Science’ is the method of acquiring knowledge and the collection of acquired knowledge to which the method is rigorously applied. It is incapable of knowing anything independently of what individuals know; in fact, it can’t know anything at all without some knowing individual to practice it. And to be sure, we can know things ‘science doesn’t know’: we know we are in love, that we are happy or sad, that we played baseball for the first time when we were 6 years old at the park in Glens Falls, etc.
Phrase in context