Posted: Sep 17, 2018 12:15 pm
GrahamH wrote:SpeedOfSound wrote:
Doesn't that fall securely in the eliminativist camp?
I don't know bout "securely in". I don't think "eliminativism" is a useful label. How do you define it?
In the sense that sport is not a substance or that language is not an object?
Consciosness in Graziano's view is something we know with certainty. It means we all have a subjective self having experiences, an inner life we can refer to. But it's not "an immortal soul" or dualism or homunculus in the brain and it's not panpsychism nor epiphenomenon.
What were you looking for when you typed "Consciousness is not a thing"? Were you camping securely outside "eliminativism" in any form?
Eliminativism for me is simply learning to find other ways to talk about subjective experience than using the word consciousness.
In the above mention of Graziano I was using it differently though. I was asking if Graziano in: "interprets that as subjective experience. The brain attributes consciousness to itself." was mounting the idea that we 'imagine' we have experience or construct it in some higher order way.
Hard to put a fine edge on this though. Hence my desire to find a new way to talk about what it is that is happening to me when I wake up and live my day than by calling it consciousness. If I am conscious than I am not sleeping or knocked out or dead. There is no 'ness' there to get nouny or verby about.
If I am 'unconscious-of' a thing then that thing could be something a thousand miles away or perhaps in another galaxy. What are we trying to say when we look for a part of the brain or a process in the brain that falls into one of two categories: unconscious or conscious?
But if you disagree then tell me what is this C-thing that you are referring to and please give an example from your waking day. Are you conscious of something in your world? Or is there something that you can factor out of being 'conscious-of' all the things that you ever have been?
If it's just the former than why not say 'aware-of' or 'attending-to'? We know how that stuff works in the brain or at least have a damned good start at knowing.
Now imagine I have just landed from another planet and you have to explain to me what all of this consciousness stuff is about because I have no language that supports it. Rorty's Antipodeans.