Anil Seth's Being You is a pretty good book. (This TED talk covers much of it; this podcast goes into more, although WTF is up with the visuals? Yeesh.)
Anil does the best takedown of David Chalmer's idiocy, which I rip off in Losing My Religions*. However, he basically dismisses Chalmer's one insight, referred to as "The Hard Problem" - why and how does it feel like anything to be conscious? How is it that we have subjective experience, that we aren't simply robots?
Instead, Anil decides to look at what he calls "The Real Problem," which is more along the lines of how consciousness works. E.g., from the video: Experience of Color; Predictive Processing; Anesthesia; Semantic Memory.
This is all interesting and cool to explore. But it simply provides no insight into The Hard Problem, which is the key question!
As I quote Sam Harris at the lead to Day 4 Concluded:
Whatever the explanation for consciousness is, it might always seem like a miracle. And for what it’s worth, I think it always will seem like a miracle.
* Another (possible) unknowable is consciousness – subjective experience. Philosopher (but not logician) David Chalmers calls it the Hard Problem. Chalmers can imagine a world exactly like ours, except no creature has consciousness. Like computers and robots, we animals would still process data and interact with the world and each other. We would react to negative stimuli but without experiencing suffering. We would seek out calorically-dense foods without experiencing the feelings of hunger or the pleasure of feasting on frosting. We would court and mate and raise children without passion or lust or love. There is seemingly no reason we need to have conscious, subjective experience, the “feeling of a feeling,” to use neuroscientist Antonio Damasio’s term.
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Consciousness is a topic where a lot of wishful thinking gets puffed up with a lot of big words and passed off as “deep thought.”
For example, Chalmers takes his imagined consciousness-less zombie world to claim that consciousness must be an “epiphenomenon.” He then jumps to believing in panpsychism, which claims that consciousness pervades the universe and is a fundamental feature of it, like gravity. (This will come up again in the later Lontermism chapter.)
However, the very first postulate in Chalmers’ argument is clearly wrong. There couldn’t be a zombie world exactly like ours, because zombies wouldn’t write books about zombies while trying to explain consciousness.
Just because Chalmers’ can imagine a consciousness-less zombie world exactly like ours doesn’t make it possible, just like my imagining a 747 flying backwards doesn’t mean the laws of aerodynamics are false.
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