Caledonian,
Philosophy has developed quite a bit since the Greeks started the Western tradition and I wasn’t invoking Greek traditions but I don’t recall the ancient skeptics getting very far.
The saying “Scientists need philosophy of science [and epistemology] like birds need ornithology” is true in a practical sense but dismissing the whole topic as irrelevant is unwarranted. Ignoring epistemological issues may be pragmatic depending on one’s career but lack of attention doesn’t resolve epistemological issues.
Through reason we can use our senses to discover flaws in our sensory systems and intuitions about the world (as well as empirically confirm the existence of cognitive biases). However, we could never have begun to make such discoveries in this world if our reason had no access to sensory perceptions or if our sensory perceptions were not accessible in a framework of space and time offered as “basic intuitions.” Whatever may exist beyond our access, our kind of experience in which we interact with physical objects outside of the direct and complete control of our imagination implies that some kind of world external to ourselves in which spatiotemporal kinds of interactions can occur exists, regardless of whether it is a “simulation” or something unfamiliar overlying a deeper reality. AGI programmers simulate a spatial world in which a young AGI system can operate temporally in part to verify actual learning is achieved, and do so in ways we can recognize based on how we learn about our environment.
Ultimately, little or no part of our experience can be cast into doubt save for immediate, transitory experience (including the experience of remembering). Everything else, including the memory of recent immediate experience used for purposes of analysis, can be doubted as a complete illusion because our minds only have direct observational access to the present (Hume). However, while “absolute” knowledge and certainty is beyond the access of minds like ours, our experiences have a sufficient amount of regularity (e.g. the unity of apperception) and predictability to allow us to reach judgments about the conditions of our day-to-day reality (e.g. locating a doorknob, expecting a sunrise) and subject questions to formal scientific methods that offer much higher degrees of warranted confidence. Whatever they believed, the only “knowledge” people have ever had applies within their domain of access as spatiotemporal beings with reason and an ability to manipulate their environment—whether or not deeper truth lies beyond it—but that scope of warrant is fully sufficient for purposes relating to their domain of experience. This view, with some other components such as arguments to cast doubt on solipsistic beliefs, is a version of “pragmatic realism.”
Sorry for veering a bit off-topic but I thought epistemology was relevant to the idea of consciousness just consisting of “illusions.” The prevailing cognitive science view these days seems to be that “perception = a kind of illusion.” My response is, “no and yes”—sensations are vital means of accessing the reality of an external world that have interpretative biases (e.g. color vision) as well as inaccuracies and quirks (e.g. blind spots, blindsight, saccades).
Ben Jones,
I’m not sure I understand the question; I don’t see personal identity v. non-identity as a binary distinction but a fuzzy one. While artifacts and characterizing information can be thought of as a form of extended identity I think sustaining relevant kinds of functional processing to produce awareness and self-awareness somewhat like what we experience would be important for creating a similar subjective experience, but over the long run the manner of information processing might become very different (hopefully enriched and more expansive) from what realizes our kind of experience. Ben Goertzel has shared some useful perspectives on the future of uploaded human minds over the long run, such as running <99% on post-human programs, swapping human life memory files (preferably from a very large and highly diverse selection), perhaps eventually finding no compelling reason not to dissolve increasingly artificial barriers between individual identities.
Cases of apperceptive agnosia, and to a lesser extent brains split at a mature stage of development, provide examples of how apperception, and the apperceptive “I” is in fact relevant to performing typical cognitive functions. I try to be careful not to make sweeping blanket statements about features of experience with a variety of uses or subtle aspects (e.g. “self = illusion”; “perception = illusion”; “judgment = illusion”; “thought = illusion”; “existence = illusion”; “illusions = ???” …now let’s just claim that “sense-data” grounds scientific methodology and knowledge, somehow… ).
The fact that information doesn’t converge in a single location in the brain does not imply that a functionally coherent “I” is not realized with access to sensory signals (and internally produced sensory imagination) and a capacity to make judgments about such content—even if physics says any instantiation within our domain of knowledge ultimately is timeless, not located in discrete 3D space and with subtle permutations manifested throughout a many-worlds space of causal possibility.
Epistemology (grounds for our ability to know anything at all, albeit without total certainty) precedes ontology (knowledge from scientific sources like empirical observation, logical analysis, mathematical modeling, Bayesian prediction, etc.) and at a deep level epistemology still reduces to basic intuitions of time and space accessed as frames of existence in which functional apperception—however it is instantiated—must integrate components of sensory perception (uni- or multimodal) into coherent physical objects as well as into collections of physical objects in unified perceptions.
Kant’s epistemology had major flaws, most centrally his weak attempt to claim his world-access idealism was just as warranted as his world-access realism, but he was right when he claimed that without functional apperception—which probably is achieved largely by temporal coordination in addition to shared access to similar information by different brain regions—we would have as many functionally discrete “I”s as we have elements of experience. On the contrary, personal experience, which we seem to be able to intersubjectively communicate and display via behavior, negates that possibility (even for people with partial disorders of apperceptive access).
Other issues relevant to the claim of a coherent, integrated “self” over longer time scales (from a subjectively “timeful” view of a given causal path) with memory or even among similar paths in the same “time slice” seems to be less substantial though not completely insignificant. However, there seems to be no basis whatsoever for claiming relevant continuity of physical instantiation (i.e. atoms aren’t localized and matter may not even “pass through” time).
I should mention I find both the “timeless/multiverse/non-experientially-determined” and “timeful/trajectory/experientially-undetermined” interpretations of physics to be helpful to consider as the “real context” to the best of our knowledge, as a global whole and an imagined/predicted local trajectory of one’s experience. The first interpretation offers means of gaining some detachment from the vicissitudes of life and some tolerance for risk and loss (e.g. delivering a campaign speech to a large crowd). The second interpretation promotes the inclination to seek optimal outcomes and reasoned selectivity among a wide array of options (e.g. choosing a better platform than “Free beer and toilet paper!”—unless one is running for a student office on a campus where satire sells).