by SpeedOfSound wrote:GrahamH wrote:SpeedOfSound wrote:
I kind of agree but the issue is that other people are never going to shut up about it until philosophy writes the chapter that shuts them up.
We know everything we need to know about how we have subjective experiences. Though in some cases the exact system details are still choosing between one or another model. If you sit down and read 1% of that science you no longer have the hard problem for yourself. The only thing left is this sense of 'how could this brain NOT be conscious?".
So a deep trek into the science has left me with an intuitive understanding of my subjective experience much like a tour of spdf orbitals has left me with a satisfying intuitive understanding of table salt.
What I am trying to do in philosophy, and so far naively failing, is to change our semantics a bit so we can have a clean analysis of what it means to understand things like table salt and our own minds. That last is difficult. We are trying to use our flashlight on the beam of our flashlight. Something has to be wrong with that approach.
In light of current discussion what's wrong with that approach is that it supposes that you have a view from inside, that "an intuitive understanding of my subjective experience" is any use at all for getting to grips with what C is, how it can be subjective and experiential at all.
I think you are trying to use beam of your virtual reality flashlight in the hope that it will illuminate something of your brain that explains C from your inner subjective view, but the flashlight can't shine out and your brain isn't inside so that route is futile.
I think we have the changed semantics. There is no hard problem. Thoughts don't originate from within a subjective mind. The brain creates the map and generates the thoughts and recognises the map as the self having experiences as if it was the thinker.
It might help if you can discard the idea that it's your mind that is working on this problem. Your brain is working on it and attributing some of the results to a subject having thoughts.
Now THAT is interesting. You just represented me as doing the polar opposite of what I am in fact doing. Where have we failed each other in the endeavor to communicate?
I'm hoping we just need to tune into the same changed semantics and drop some phrases that have the taint of worn out metaphors. "light of consciousness is one of those. Mind examining mind is another. Throw out the Cogito.
Don't appeal to intuition about self, it is almost guaranteed to mislead.
Don't treat subject and object as two things, consider subject-experiences-qualia-of-object as a unit construction.
Be very sceptical of the concept of introspection. if there is no subject mind thinking it's own thoughts then introspection is a lie. It must be a brain constructing the thoughts and attributing them to a model or schema of a self that is not actually interior and cannot think for itself. Now it's simpler. Everything is projected in from outside. All the work is brain activity.
