Does anyone actually agree with Daniel Dennett that consiousness is an illusion?

[Whateverist]

So no...there is consensus that what we experience are brain created mental models rather than direct physical world as it is.

I still think the issue is as much due to the inadequacy of language as anything else. That "our brains create mental models" is one way of speaking and that the "world presents itself a certain way to creatures like us" is another. The world is not likely an active agent in this but then whatever models are being constructed are presumably happening spontaneously, no? Either way your use of "qualia" is a way of saying consciousness is real, I think.

 

[fantome profane]

Consciousness is detectable.
So not an illusion.
Is it somehow useful to us to treat consciousness as an illusion?
(That didn't work out so well for claims that reality is an illusion.)

Rainbows are detectable.

 

[vulcanlogician]

Here is what Dennett has to say in his own words:

I think Dennett's position (functionalism) is plausible. But that doesn't make it problem-free.

Functionalism reduces all of consciousness to information feedback. A functionalist would be prone to say that things like AI might be conscious. It would even be able to experience something like pain, if it were somehow possible to identify the formula for pain (information-wise) and run it through an AI's neural net.

On the other hand we have biological naturalism. This theory states that consciousness is something PHYSICAL... just like the functionalists say. But it is physical in the sense that that it is causally reducible to nervous activity and brain states. Unless you have neurons that fire, you DON'T have consciousness. That's what a biological naturalist thinks. It has nothing to do with information. It has to do with the physical states of neurons. The issue that biological naturalists put before the functionalists is: there is no ontological reduction between brain states and the quality of our conscious experiences.

Now, remember, both camps agree that consciousness is CAUSALLY reducible to brain activity. Neither camp proposes ectoplasm or any kind of Cartesian soul. They are both PHYSICALIST theories.

The first "physicalist" in the Western tradition (who worked on the problem of consciousness) was-- my avatar-- Baruch Spinoza. According to him, our mental experiences ARE PHYSICAL THINGS. Why does he think so? Because of that causal reducibility that we were discussing earlier. He was one of the first guys to really start paying attention to that. His way of thinking is called "dual-aspect monism." It's a bit antiquated by now, but I think it gets the job done pretty well. I also (and this is a huge guess) think that Spinoza would tend toward biological naturalism rather than functionalism if he were alive today. But, again, that's just my personal guess. And even I'm only like 80% on it.

 

[Mock Turtle]

Actually my use of crazy was to describe their statements -not their beliefs- which I think are probably deliberate attention getters. I doubt they think they have any belief at stake either in their statement or in my objection. Dawkins has said elsewhere that he regretted using 'selfish gene' as a metaphor so I don't think he really does think that is where our volition comes from while we ourselves are zombies. I think he is just being provocative for the attention. I don't like that.

I can understand that, and I seem to recall the same (about the title of the book), but it hardly impacts on the work, which is quite reasonable, in that genetics tends to be so important as to evolution.

I have never belittled anyone's beliefs nor would I. Just once while writing frankly about my own beliefs I precipitated the de-conversion of Christian Brit who was clearly miserable after. Now I am pro- everyone's faith. I think we all have faith in something, that is, operational beliefs which we hold without interpersonally sound justification. Some of us know we do and others are oblivious about where their faith lies.

Perhaps I am just more sensitive to the language used - where many often seem more like politicians as to persuasion when the language used by scientists, philosophers, and others tends to rise above such.

 

[PureX]

If consciousness is illusion, how could we recognize it as such?

The proposition is incoherent. That doesn't make it wrong, it just makes it undeterminable.

 

[LuisDantas]

Not really well aware of Dennett's work, but sure, I have no problem with statements that consciousness is an illusion. It probably is.

 

[Whateverist]

There is no such thing as redness or blueness out there in the world.

I think when we say we saw something blue what we mean is we something which under the given conditions gives rise to the perception of blue in creatures like us who have no deficit for color receptivity. Of course, no one actually talks like that. As for so much else of what we say, much is, as it must be, implicit.

 

[wellwisher]

Where did you get that idea from and what is your evidence?
It sounds a bit like psychology but nothing I can recognise.

I first learned about the inner self from the late psychologist Carl Jung. Jung was the star pupil of Sigmund Freud, who Freud thought would continue his work. Freud was more about the ego. The Id of Freud sort of lumped the unconscious mind. Jung departed from Freud, when he wanted to differentiated the Id, into the shadow; personal unconscious and the archetypes of collective unconscious, which are like apps of the brain that define humans as a species. The inner self is the center of the collective unconscious.

Later, after learning by reading the collective works of Jung, since I was Development Engineer by trade, I performed unconscious mind experiments using the laboratory of my mind and consciousness, to gain first hand data of the inner self and the archetypes of the collective unconscious. The inner self is a real and has a connection to higher human potential.

A good primer book to read, by Jung, is the "Undiscovered Self". That was the first book of Jung I read. it created an interest in me to learn more since it implied something beyond the ego. Eventually I would do experiments on myself to gain first hand data, to prove this was real to myself.

By having two centers of consciousness, consciousness gets a stereo optic affect by looking a reality from two angles at the same time; ego=cultural and inner self=natural. The old saying, I think therefore I am, is one angle. There is also I feel or intuit therefore I am. I can think logically about something, but it may or may not feel right. I may feel or sense a nagging doubt. I try to use both conscious eyes until they both agree; spatially conscious.

 

[Whateverist]

Here is what Dennett has to say in his own words:

I think Dennett's position (functionalism) is plausible. But that doesn't make it problem-free.

Functionalism reduces all of consciousness to information feedback. A functionalist would be prone to say that things like AI might be conscious. It would even be able to experience something like pain, if it were somehow possible to identify the formula for pain (information-wise) and run it through an AI's neural net.

On the other hand we have biological naturalism. This theory states that consciousness is something PHYSICAL... just like the functionalists say. But it is physical in the sense that that it is causally reducible to nervous activity and brain states. Unless you have neurons that fire, you DON'T have consciousness. That's what a biological naturalist thinks. It has nothing to do with information. It has to do with the physical states of neurons. The issue that biological naturalists put before the functionalists is: there is no ontological reduction between brain states and the quality of our conscious experiences.

Now, remember, both camps agree that consciousness is CAUSALLY reducible to brain activity. Neither camp proposes ectoplasm or any kind of Cartesian soul. They are both PHYSICALIST theories.

The first "physicalist" in the Western tradition (who worked on the problem of consciousness) was-- my avatar-- Baruch Spinoza. According to him, our mental experiences ARE PHYSICAL THINGS. Why does he think so? Because of that causal reducibility that we were discussing earlier. He was one of the first guys to really start paying attention to that. His way of thinking is called "dual-aspect monism." It's a bit antiquated by now, but I think it gets the job done pretty well. I also (and this is a huge guess) think that Spinoza would tend toward biological naturalism rather than functionalism if he were alive today. But, again, that's just my personal guess. And even I'm only like 80% on it.

Don't feel neglected, @vulcanlogician. I believe Iain McGilchrist's philosophy could also be described as "dual-aspect monism". For him the cosmos or simply nature would be the basis of the monism and matter and consciousness would be its two aspects. But I am still incubating what I think about this video and what to say. I do appreciate your effort to present Dennett's words in a useful light. Still thinking but in the meantime in my reading last night the discussion turned very logically from the rejection of Dennett's denial of consciousness (if that is really what his words meant) to the possibility that we might simply dismiss Matter instead. If lopping off one horn of the hard problem dilemma and consciousness can't be the one, how about the other? A ridiculous notion to me but I question whether it is quite as ridiculous as a plain reading of Dennett's words. All that follows is an extended excerpt from The Matter With Things, beginning on page 1607 on my Kindle:


CAN WE DENY MATTER ALTOGETHER?

Matter itself is an abstraction which no-one has ever seen: we have only seen elements of the world to which we attribute the quality, within our consciousness, of being material. It both substitutes an idea for an experience (which is a kind of event) and, in doing so, produces something static, no longer in process: no longer an experience, now a thing. According to Bohr, ‘isolated material particles are abstractions, their properties being definable and observable only through their interaction with other systems.’45 Materialism derives the only thing we undeniably know, the concreteness of experience, from an unknown abstraction: matter.

A number of philosophers had already come to this conclusion. Thus FCS Schiller wrote in 1891:

It appears that all we know of matter is the forces it exercises. Matter, therefore, is said to be unknowable in itself ... And yet it is perhaps hardly astonishing that a baseless abstraction should be unknowable in itself. And matter certainly is such an abstraction. For all that appears to us is bodies, which we call material. They possess certain more or less obvious points of resemblance, and the abstraction, ‘matter’, is promptly invented to account for them.46​

And later:

All the sensible qualities of matter are due to forces, gravitative, cohesive, propulsive, chemical, electrical, or to motions (like heat, sound, light, etc), or ‘motive forces’. Matter itself, therefore, is left as the unknown and unknowable substratum of force ... It is not required to explain the appearance of anything we can experience, and is merely a metaphysical fiction designed to provide forces with a vehicle.47​

But, as we saw in the previous chapter, energy needs no substratum. Above all, matter cannot be called on to bring about the ‘annihilation of the mind by means of one of [the mind’s] own abstractions.

In a 2017 essay entitled ‘Minding matter: the closer you look, the more the materialist position in physics appears to rest on shaky metaphysical ground’, Frank eloquently expresses both the mystery of consciousness and the puzzling reluctance of many biologists to entertain theories that venture beyond viewing consciousness as a result of processing in the brain. ‘Materialists appeal to physics to explain the mind’, he writes, ‘but in modern physics the particles that make up a brain remain, in many ways, as mysterious as consciousness itself.’ And he continues:

Some consciousness researchers might think that they are being hard-nosed and concrete when they appeal to the authority of physics. When pressed on this issue, though, we physicists are often left looking at our feet, smiling sheepishly and mumbling something about ‘it’s complicated’. We know that matter remains mysterious just as mind remains mysterious, and we don’t know what the connections between those mysteries should be. Classifying consciousness as a material problem is tantamount to saying that consciousness, too, remains fundamentally unexplained. 49​

All this may be importantly true, but I think we should no more conclude that we can deny matter than that we can deny consciousness. Neither way out of our dilemma is at all satisfactory. What, then, can we say about matter? Strawson uses the word physicalism to refer to a reality which is not antithetically divided into matter and mind, but incorporates both elements as indivisible. From this perspective he writes: ‘It’s not just that we don’t definitely know the nature and limits of the physical. We definitely don’t know the nature or limits of the physical. Physics may tell us a great deal about the structure of physical reality’, he writes:

but it seems that it can’t tell us anything about the intrinsic nature of reality in so far as its intrinsic nature is more than its structure ... It’s plain that the human science of physics can’t fully characterise the nature of concrete reality, even in principle ... On many matters, such as experience, physics is simply silent. If you’re not clear on this limitation, you have no idea what physics is. This isn’t New Age anti-scientism, it’s hardnosed physicalism.’51​

If asked my view, I would say that matter appears to be an element within consciousness that provides the necessary resistance for creation; and with that, inevitably, for individuality to arise. All individual beings, including ourselves, bring forms into being and cause them to persist: each of us is not, ultimately, any one conformation in matter, but, Ship of Theseus-like, the conformation itself, the morphogenetic field, which requires matter in order to be brought into being, but, once existent, persists while matter comes and goes within it.Remember Schopenhauer: ‘Matter is that which persists and endures.’52 Since the development of new such form-fields in consciousness seems to be part of the creative process of the cosmos, the lending of persistence (for a while) may be matter’s peculiar role.

All this may be importantly true, but I think we should no more conclude that we can deny matter than that we can deny consciousness. Neither way out of our dilemma is at all satisfactory. What, then, can we say about matter? Strawson uses the word physicalism to refer to a reality which is not antithetically divided into matter and mind, but incorporates both elements as indivisible. From this perspective he writes: ‘It’s not just that we don’t definitely know the nature and limits of the physical. We definitely don’t know the nature or limits of the physical. Physics may tell us a great deal about the structure of physical reality’, he writes:

but it seems that it can’t tell us anything about the intrinsic nature of reality in so far as its intrinsic nature is more than its structure ... It’s plain that the human science of physics can’t fully characterise the nature of concrete reality, even in principle ... On many matters, such as experience, physics is simply silent. If you’re not clear on this limitation, you have no idea what physics is. This isn’t New Age anti-scientism, it’s hardnosed physicalism.’51​

If asked my view, I would say that matter appears to be an element within consciousness that provides the necessary resistance for creation; and with that, inevitably, for individuality to arise. All individual beings, including ourselves, bring forms into being and cause them to persist: each of us is not, ultimately, any one conformation in matter, but, Ship of Theseus-like, the conformation itself, the morphogenetic field, which requires matter in order to be brought into being, but, once existent, persists while matter comes and goes within it.Remember Schopenhauer: ‘Matter is that which persists and endures.’52 Since the development of new such form-fields in consciousness seems to be part of the creative process of the cosmos, the lending of persistence (for a while) may be matter’s peculiar role.

 

[Yerda]

I am conscious right now, meaning that I am awake and self-aware. There is nothing inherently special about these features, though, in the way that the "hard problem of consciousness" proposes.

There is something special in the way the hard problem proposes. You are having experiences. The hard problem refers to the difficulty science has in explaining this. Experiences are special because our understanding of the physical universe doesn't involve them.

 

[Whateverist]

Here is what Dennett has to say in his own words:

I think Dennett's position (functionalism) is plausible. But that doesn't make it problem-free.

Functionalism reduces all of consciousness to information feedback. A functionalist would be prone to say that things like AI might be conscious. It would even be able to experience something like pain, if it were somehow possible to identify the formula for pain (information-wise) and run it through an AI's neural net.

On the other hand we have biological naturalism. This theory states that consciousness is something PHYSICAL... just like the functionalists say. But it is physical in the sense that that it is causally reducible to nervous activity and brain states. Unless you have neurons that fire, you DON'T have consciousness. That's what a biological naturalist thinks. It has nothing to do with information. It has to do with the physical states of neurons. The issue that biological naturalists put before the functionalists is: there is no ontological reduction between brain states and the quality of our conscious experiences.

Now, remember, both camps agree that consciousness is CAUSALLY reducible to brain activity. Neither camp proposes ectoplasm or any kind of Cartesian soul. They are both PHYSICALIST theories.

The first "physicalist" in the Western tradition (who worked on the problem of consciousness) was-- my avatar-- Baruch Spinoza. According to him, our mental experiences ARE PHYSICAL THINGS. Why does he think so? Because of that causal reducibility that we were discussing earlier. He was one of the first guys to really start paying attention to that. His way of thinking is called "dual-aspect monism." It's a bit antiquated by now, but I think it gets the job done pretty well. I also (and this is a huge guess) think that Spinoza would tend toward biological naturalism rather than functionalism if he were alive today. But, again, that's just my personal guess. And even I'm only like 80% on it.

I think he is too quick to assume that any interest in or attempt to understand consciousness must take the form of an empirical audit of a Cartesian theater. But why must it be something ridiculous or else simply ignored? I never think about ‘qualia’ at all nor do I look to treat consciousness as an empirical research project and yet I find consciousness understood as our experience as such to be rich especially in relation to creative pursuits, reflection on the nature of self hood and out connection to nature/ the cosmos at large. No need for any internal entertainment room. We are nature and we are in the world and there is an obvious feedback between our understanding/expectation and what we find in the world. To only study the world as an uninhabited, mechanism in which we are just more cogs is self determinative but avoidable. There is absolutely no advantage to the ‘view from nowhere’. Much better to embody our embodiment in a fuller way than merely analysis. Reality is interactive unless we abdicate who/what we are.

I agree with McGilchrist that nature/life is something like Quantum Field Theory. Consciousness plays a role in determining the forms that life assumes, but not anything like a computer game where one is free to indulge in fantasies. Reality id still reality, however it is or should be inhabited.

 

[Jimmy]

The only way I could see it as an illusion is if I were to compare it to the universe other than that it’s real to me

 

[wellwisher]

Arousal, starts in the thalamus, located in the center of the brain, and triggers the brain stem. The thalamus is the most wired part of the brain, being a central integrating and switching station. The thalamus signals to the brain stem will trigger a sensation cascade, that can make the ego consciously aware. This dual center explain many things. Modern psychology is too ego-centric and does not give due justice to the inner self which is more advanced; wired, than the ego. The inner self is what give us the intuitions of something higher; thalamus versus cerebral.

Consciousness also has a connection to how neurons works. The neurons expend 90% of their metabolic energy exchanging and concentrating cations on opposite sides of the neuron membrane. This results in a decrease in entropy, which goes against the second law. The second law states that the entropy of the universe has to increase, yet the brain is working feverishly, to constantly decrease entropy. The brain is paddling upstream, as the current of the 2nd law flows downstream.

Entropy is an odd duck, in that it is similar to time, in that both time and entropy naturally want to head in one direction. Time moves to future. Time does not naturally go backwards or cycle like energy. Entropy also wants in increase to the future, and like time is unidirectional, unless we force the issue, like neurons.

Energy cycles and repeats; wave. This is not the nature of time. We do not age and then grow young all the way back to birth to be reborn; reincarnation. Entropy also acts similar to a repulsive force that likes to spread things out, like ions in water, to loosen things up, to help add complexity as the brain paddles upstream.

When entropy increases, it absorbs energy and the free energy decreases. If the entropy of the universe has to increase, then useful free energy is being lost by the universe, since it gets tied up into ever increasing entropy. Since energy has to be conserved, the energy absorbed into increasing entropy is no longer available to the material universe. The mind has speculated that this conserved energy, generated by neurons, brain and consciousness, made be conserved in another realm; quantum level.

When neurons fire, entropy will increase, arousal is created, and memory is made conscious. Since this is absorbing energy, free energy is lost to the universe, but conserved in another realm. We build up a capacitance in the afterlife with all our unique memories; eternal soul. This is easier to model with separated time and separated space instead of by space-time.

Entropy, although still used in engineering, is a concept that is not as much in vogue in pure science. However, it is how life and the brain are able to become a different state of matter compared to inanimate matter; like fossils. Water is key. The stone that the builders rejected has become the chief cornerstone.

 

[wellwisher]

Im interesting application of entropy, that is widely used by life, is osmosis. Osmosis is a colligative property of matter meaning it only depends on concentration, but not the character of the solute.

Colligative properties are those properties of solutions that depend on the number of dissolved particles in solution, but not on the identities of the solutes. For example, the freezing point of salt water is lower than that of pure water, due to the presence of the salt dissolved in the water. To a good approximation, it does not matter whether the salt dissolved in water is sodium chloride or potassium nitrate; if the molar amounts of solute are the same and the number of ions are the same, the freezing points will be the same.

Read more: http://www.chemistryexplained.com/Ce-Co/Colligative-Properties.html#ixzz8BljwcZyr

In osmosis, we have a semipermeable membrane that does not allow free transport in both directions across the membrane. In the most common example, water can diffuse both ways across the membrane, but any soluble solutes, like ions, will selectively be kept on one side. Since this creates a concentration gradient relative to the ions in water; entropic potential, there is an entropic push for the ions to cross the membrane and form equal amounts on both side. However, the membrane does not allow this, causing a lingering entropic potential.

Since water can freely move across the membrane, it does the job for the solutes in the system, lowering the concentration and entropy for the ions, by water flowing into the ion rich side in an attempt to dilute that side down to the needed equilibrium concentrations. However, this builds a pressure head; osmotic pressure; right side below, which adds free energy; gravitational potential, until that balances the lingering free energy needed for the lingering ionic entropy. Gravity has a connection to entropy, which Einstein associated with bending of space-time; consciousness.

In the case of neurons, the sodium and potassium ions are actively pumped and exchanged, with each ion impacting the neuron water, differently. Since osmosis is a colligative property these are interchangeable in terms of entropy.; concentration dependent. Sodium ions which concentrate outside the membrane are kosmotropic which means that they create more order in water than pure water creates for itself. The potassiums lions, which concentrate inside, are chaotropic which means they create less order in water than pure water creates for itself.

The net result is sodium ions in water tends to have a larger water structure around it while potassium ions in water have a smaller structure of hydrated water. In the case of osmosis, the larger hydrated sodium become essentially impermeable, while hydrated potassium by being smaller in water, are more permeable, as is the water. The neuron creates a selective permeability, using water and membrane.

The potassium will diffuse across the membrane, outward to help lower the overall concentration gradient, making the inside less positive or more negative. The lingering entropic potential is balanced, when the sodium and potassium cations outside, repel their positive charges, with the equilibrium called the membrane potential. The sodium cannot just leave by being repelled die to the concentration gradient inward. The neuron does not just have a charge gradient; membrane potential, but it also has a residual entropic potential. The pressure of osmotic water outward; osmotic pressure, help pushes out axon and dendrite branches.

The membrane potential is the muscle, but the entropic potential is the wild card behind consciousness. When you have trillions of neurons, with entropic potential, coordinating their release; firing and brain waves, this summation impacts the global features of the brain, with the thalamus the mediator for the cyclic entropic potential through its extensive wiring and feedback loops, increasing brain entropy, driven by the second law; learning potential.

 

[vulcanlogician]

I think he is too quick to assume that any interest in or attempt to understand consciousness must take the form of an empirical audit of a Cartesian theater.

I disagree. Not that I agree with Dennett's position or anything, but I would stop short of accusing him of hasty assumptions. He's being very careful. It's a bit of a misconstrual to say that he (or other functionalists) "deny consciousness."

What they do is "explain consciousness away." We should pay attention to why the theory is called FUNCTIONalism. In a way, the functionalist explains why consciousness exists. If a bunny rabbit were to put its paw onto a needle, it would experience something qualitative (ie. pain). A nuts and bolts observation of the bunny putting its paw on the needle doesn't indicate the qualitative aspect of the experience. According to Dennett, the conscious experience is there because it performs a function in the causal chain. And, thus the existence of such a conscious state is what explains why the qualitative experience of a pin prick exists in the first place. It is a result of the reality of the bunny's nervous system activating, thus compelling the bunny to pull its paw away.

I'm kind of with Dennett up to this point. Where I diverge (or am tempted to diverge) from Dennett is with the claim that the function that consciousness plays in the causal chain is a complete explanation of consciousness.

I believe Iain McGilchrist's philosophy could also be described as "dual-aspect monism".

I should probably come out and state that "dual-aspect" monism is a term applied to Spinoza by later thinkers.

It may be something of a misnomer because Spinoza reckoned that the ultimate reality possessed infinite attributes (or aspects). We, as humans, are only aware of two: thought and extension (or mind and body, if you will). But Spinoza would be most correctly described as an "infinite aspect" monist.

 

[Whateverist]

I disagree. Not that I agree with Dennett's position or anything, but I would stop short of accusing him of hasty assumptions. He's being very careful. It's a bit of a misconstrual to say that he (or other functionalists) "deny consciousness."

What they do is "explain consciousness away." We should pay attention to why the theory is called FUNCTIONalism. In a way, the functionalist explains why consciousness exists. If a bunny rabbit were to put its paw onto a needle, it would experience something qualitative (ie. pain). A nuts and bolts observation of the bunny putting its paw on the needle doesn't indicate the qualitative aspect of the experience. According to Dennett, the conscious experience is there because it performs a function in the causal chain. And, thus the existence of such a conscious state is what explains why the qualitative experience of a pin prick exists in the first place. It is a result of the reality of the bunny's nervous system activating, thus compelling the bunny to pull its paw away.

I'm kind of with Dennett up to this point. Where I diverge (or am tempted to diverge) from Dennett is with the claim that the function that consciousness plays in the causal chain is a complete explanation of consciousness.


I should probably come out and state that "dual-aspect" monism is a term applied to Spinoza by later thinkers.

It may be something of a misnomer because Spinoza reckoned that the ultimate reality possessed infinite attributes (or aspects). We, as humans, are only aware of two: thought and extension (or mind and body, if you will). But Spinoza would be most correctly described as an "infinite aspect" monist.

When Dennett says people imagine that somewhere in their skull there is a private viewing room where only they process sensations, memories and feelings he means to make that seem ridiculous. But of course subjectivity or first person experience is largely private. We may have a hunch what someone else is experiencing but we can't directly check for ourselves. Making consciousness sound as if it is essentially a mistaken, naive belief entailing imaginary homunculi is to straw man the nature of consciousness, leading to his objective as dismissing it altogether.

If it sounds like I don't respect him, it is true. I don't hold all practitioners of philosophy on the same pedestal nor do I think I should. He is a bit of moron at least regarding consciousness in my opinion. There is lots of worthy ideas in the world, more than there is time in our lives to take them in. My triage says his don't deserve my time.

 

[vulcanlogician]

He is a bit of moron at least regarding consciousness in my opinion.

I disagree. Just because he is wrong, doesn't make him morose.

Let's suppose he is wrong. Does that invalidate his criticisms? No. Anyone who disagrees with Dennett has some explaining to do.

If Dennett is wrong, then he is wrong in the way Isaac Newton was wrong. Ultimately disproved in the final analysis, but one who painstakingly set up the soon-to-be-refuted idea so that we could learn more.

 

[Twilight Hue]

I don't see consciousness as an illusion , but it can certainly be approached as being illusory.

 

[Whateverist]

I disagree. Just because he is wrong, doesn't make him morose.

I don't mind disagreeing with you, my friend. It doesn't necessarily make him moronic either but I find him irritating in case that wasn't obvious. I don't think it is simply a matter of disagreement over some facts. His sense of academic entitlement and his obvious disdain for common sense earn him my disdain.

Let's suppose he is wrong. Does that invalidate his criticisms? No. Anyone who disagrees with Dennett has some explaining to do.

Any appeal to authority will fall on deaf ears here. I think the esteem he is held in him should require more from him, not less. Explaining to do? Nope, he isn't all that.