SpeedOfSound wrote:You just said what amounts to: the only evidence we have of consciousness is our intuition about what is conscious. Now if some people have an intuition that a thermostat is conscious and some don't then your evidence is gone. This is the problem!
Turning that to cogito we want to call it evidence that you and I are convinced that we ourselves are conscious. Here we have evidence that we cannot both observe but we can observe each other talking about our private beetle in a box. Intuitively.
But now surely you can see that we never actually see our own beetle in a box from the perspective that would allow us to say 'I see it now'.
I am not convinced that I am conscious, though the intuition that I am is certainly powerful.
Evidence does come down to intuitions, and intuitions can contradict each other. I think my intuition that I am conscious, that is, that I am an essentially unitary self with essentially private thoughts, is a mistaken intuition. I think (though I could be wrong) that if I could understand the mechanisms of my brain and other people’s brains I would not have any intuition that I or others have awareness as well as those mechanisms. The intuitions of folk psychology contradict the intuitions of science.
At present, the intuition that people have awareness is useful for practical purposes, because the pre-scientific evolved processes of Theory of Mind (which give us that intuition) are still the best way we have of predicting other people. If we could fully understand our brain mechanisms using the intuitions which lead to scientific understanding, we would have better, more accurate predictions, and the idea that anything has awareness would become redundant. I think that if we had the god’s-eye view of ourselves as mechanisms, we would lose the intuition that we are conscious.
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