Except that colour does exist, no matter how you choose to define it.
I don't believe it does.
You know how woo-woos constantly claim that, because they're ignorant of some topic or another, everybody else must also be? That's exactly what you're doing here. That YOU don't know of any of the evidence I talk about doesn't mean no one else does.
False cause fallacy. I say no evidence exists because I'm familiar with the literature, and even though I disagree with many of the conclusions one thing is for sure; there is no evidence consciousness exists.
I wasn't talking about you.
I can't speak to why other people believe things.
Baron, come on. The robot looks at the experiment but at some point a human's going to have to take a peek if we're to do science. You're one step away from solipsism, here.
That's a very strange thing to say. Where is it stipulated that only humans can do science? What is to prevent an intelligent robot doing science? Indeed, robots do perform scientific work in many spheres. They conduct experiments and collate results. Just because
currently they are not advanced enough to innovate, extrapolate and perform all the tasks required for the scientific method is irrelevant. Your view that humans are somehow special in the universe, that we are the only entities that can possibly perform science, is another example of religious dogmatism passed off as critical thought.
Then you must admit that you have ZERO confidence in the efficacy of any medecine, since much of it is down to reporting. That is a silly and unworkable standard, and yet another demonstration of why philosophy fails to describe reality.
It is very silly, which is why I said the
opposite of what you allege. I said I
trust study subjects to report truthfully their experience. Trust, as I have explained, is not evidence.
It is the untestability that raises many skeptics' hackles. I've heard nattering that whatever consciousness is happens way down at the Planck scale. Per my EXTREMELY poor understanding, even if we could see things that small, we would be changing the behavior of particles just by observing them.
Per the article I linked to:
That last bit is fascinating because it posits that at least in theory, "group think" could be literally true. It opens a lovely can of worms for philosophers to snack on. Mass hysteria, flock behavior, evangelical fervor and even the theory that in ancient times everybody heard voices in their head. (The bicameral mind theory). I once read a book involving that theory and it left me wondering, but where did the voices come from? And before that, was there even first-person concept 10,000 years ago? Then you have room for Jungian archetypes, qualia etc.
I agree with these conclusions, re group behaviour. I can maybe explain my thinking in this way:
* Imagine the conscious field as a flat, 2d sheet (of course it's not 2d, but for ease of imagining).
* A complex entity (say an ant) appears on this sheet. The ant processes information in its little ant brain.
* A distortion appears at the point of information processing in the conscious field, and this is the ant's (minuscule) consciousness.
* Add a million more ants. Each ant produces the same distortion in the field representing its own conscious experience.
* But now there is communication
between ants, and this communication also produces distortion of the field, but an overarching distortion - group consciousness - overlaid on the individual consciousnesses of the ants.
* When the magnitude of this distortion exceeds that of the individual, the individual behaves under the group influence as opposed to its own.
This is what I believe anyhow, and I have done since long before I heard of IIT (which I first read about three or four years ago).
