Timeline for The ultimate absurdity: if consciousness is an illusion, how can anything we know be real?
Current License: CC BY-SA 4.0
37 events
| when toggle format | what | by | license | comment | |
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| Jan 2 at 1:42 | answer | added | meatworm | timeline score: 0 | |
| Nov 29, 2023 at 12:31 | answer | added | Ioannis Paizis | timeline score: 1 | |
| Nov 29, 2023 at 10:30 | answer | added | Meanach | timeline score: 1 | |
| Oct 26, 2023 at 18:10 | comment | added | infatuated | Thank you @Meanach. You can express your approval by upvotes on posts and comments. | |
| Oct 26, 2023 at 16:37 | comment | added | Meanach | I agree with the questioner that this proposition is sophism. | |
| Oct 26, 2023 at 16:31 | comment | added | Meanach | "The word illusion does not have its usual meaning". I paraphrase, but what!!! What is the meaning then? Please enlighten us! Did not Wittgenstein repudiate the nonsense that words have anything other than their normal meaning? In my view, philosophy is about elucidation, not obfuscation. | |
| Oct 26, 2023 at 11:54 | comment | added | Meanach | Cogito ergo sum. We perceive reality only through consciousness. Qualia are reality. since an illusion can only exist in consciousness. The statement that consciousness is an illusion is a paradox. The statement is illogical, and unscientific in that it cannot be tested. I prefer to ask questions that are capable of exploration. | |
| Sep 20, 2023 at 6:23 | comment | added | infatuated | This helps explain why consciousness is not similar to a contradictory assumption in proof by contradiction. Consciousness per se is a fact of nature. It doesn't and shouldn't correspond to anything. However, it's particular forms, i.e. mental states including false assumptions may or may not correspond to something. The failure in distinguishing consciousness from its various forms I believe explains most of contrary comments here. | |
| Sep 20, 2023 at 6:19 | comment | added | infatuated | @CharlesHudgins Thank you for contributing. I respond with the purpose of enriching this debate. As for the theory that consciousness may be a signifier without a signified, there are other ways of responding: consciousness is fundamental or consciousness in its pure form is simply the act of awareness. So awareness per se is a fact of the world and doesn't have to correspond to anything just as the actual Earth doesn't to correspond to anything. But awareness has a peculiar feature to it: when it is applied to objects, it gives rises to particular states that do signify things. | |
| Sep 20, 2023 at 2:51 | answer | added | Brian | timeline score: 0 | |
| Sep 19, 2023 at 12:58 | answer | added | AnoE | timeline score: 2 | |
| Sep 19, 2023 at 11:15 | answer | added | Corbin | timeline score: 0 | |
| Sep 19, 2023 at 5:54 | comment | added | infatuated | Still I see in those theories an awareness of the subsumptive nature of consciousness which only corroborates my point, that whatever is true of consciousness must be true of its particular states. So either all mental states are false/illusion or the doctrine fails. | |
| Sep 19, 2023 at 5:53 | comment | added | infatuated | @Conifold I appreciate your continued interest in our exchange. I can recognize you are far more deeply studied in modern philosophy than me. However I still have to humbly disagree. I am broadly familiar with the idea of unconscious mental states raised in higher order theories, but I think those theories are misguided in their assumption that any such states exist. Unconscious pain is not pain, and a forgotten visual experience only points to absence of memory not of consciousness during the experience. | |
| Sep 19, 2023 at 5:09 | comment | added | Conifold | You are simply mistaken on the logic. It reminds me Saccheri's frustration when he was unable to derive a contradiction from negation of the parallel postulate. He instead derived a string of counterintuitive consequences and concluded that they are "repugnant to the nature of straight line". We do have representational theories with unconscious mental states, and formulating claims and "entertaining" (reasoning about) them certainly does not require consciousness, ChatGPT does it. | |
| Sep 19, 2023 at 4:48 | comment | added | infatuated | @Conifold I am surprised that people think these wild hypotheses are even consistent. Your epistemic conspiracy has it that mind some how conjures up sense of consciousness and puts it into more particular mental states, but that ignores how without consciousness there can't be any mental state or theory about it to begin with. I mean we would not be able to entertain even these wild claims if consciousness was not there. Such theories therefore seem to fail to see consciousness for what it is: not just another process or state but the very foundation for everything else to be and make sense | |
| Sep 19, 2023 at 1:42 | comment | added | Charles Hudgins | To speak to "what do they mean by illusion" the answers will of course be various, but you could think, for example, that "consciousness" is a signifier without a signified. It's something we have words for but which in fact corresponds to no physical or metaphysical reality. There is no manifest contradiction in saying so. It happens all the time that people think / act as if they're talking about something when in fact they're talking about nothing (take for example any proof by contradiction that starts with "suppose there exists..."). Why couldn't consciousness be like that? | |
| Sep 19, 2023 at 1:34 | comment | added | Charles Hudgins | It's worth noting that the conclusion "philosophy is hopeless" is not necessarily a reductio ad absurdum. We may simply live in a world in which it is unhappily the case that we can't know anything and in which moreover knowledge itself is a vacuous concept. People have done work to show that this can't be the case (e.g. Kant) but it's not as simple as saying "that seems bad so it can't be right" (famously Kant writes at considerable length on this problem). | |
| Sep 18, 2023 at 22:08 | comment | added | Robbie Goodwin | Didn't Descartes deal with that in 'I think, therefore I am'? | |
| Sep 18, 2023 at 16:52 | answer | added | Hokon | timeline score: 7 | |
| Sep 18, 2023 at 13:53 | history | became hot network question | |||
| Sep 18, 2023 at 11:30 | comment | added | Conifold | That's not a proof if introspection makes up representations of its role and significance and inserts them into all other representations. You are simply compelled into the proposition that other propositions cannot be formed without its fables. | |
| Sep 18, 2023 at 11:08 | comment | added | infatuated | @Conifold But to me the proof for that premise is very simple. If I am not conscious, I can't think or form any propositions. So yes, yes, and yes! | |
| Sep 18, 2023 at 10:23 | answer | added | NotThatGuy | timeline score: 4 | |
| Sep 18, 2023 at 9:15 | comment | added | Conifold | Like you said, "if". And now if not. Propositional knowledge and perception are definitely not tethered to consciousness, there are physical interactions with propositional output in verbal or some other representational form. The consciousness story is part of that output purporting to represent how it is produced. If the story is a fable then all the "logic" out of it falls by the wayside. It does not mean that all representations are likewise fables, perhaps, only self-representations are blinded by proximity. Counterintuitive, yes, conspiratorial, yes, logically contradictory, no. | |
| Sep 18, 2023 at 8:57 | answer | added | Chris Degnen | timeline score: 2 | |
| Sep 18, 2023 at 8:26 | comment | added | infatuated | @Conifold But like I said if consciousness is the condition of all perception and knowledge and more precisely if perception and knowledge are themselves forms of consciousness, then logically no true perception and knowledge is in principle possible whatsoever. The only way out of this would be not to consider perception and propositional knowledge as forms of consciousness but only self-representation or self-consciousness, but that would be quite counter-intuitive again and absurd because our consciousness does extend to perceptions and beliefs. | |
| Sep 18, 2023 at 8:25 | comment | added | Hudjefa | Hic sunt dracones | |
| Sep 18, 2023 at 8:01 | comment | added | Conifold | If you already decided they are "absurd" regardless why ask the question, let alone twice? If the interest is genuine reading them is more effective than snippets here anyway. The implications are heavy, but far from everything, anything and suicide. We have perception, which is known to be mistaken, but not on everything and anything, and we have physical means of verification that correct it. That our brain function compels mistaken self-representations would not imply that its other representations are wholly mistaken, nor will it preclude means of verification that bypass them. | |
| Sep 18, 2023 at 7:58 | answer | added | user67675 | timeline score: -1 | |
| Sep 18, 2023 at 7:25 | comment | added | infatuated | @Conifold I have difficulty understanding what kind of "illusion" they have "in mind" (!) and I don't seriously believe it is at bottom any different regardless of all theoretical constructs that they may come up with. So may I ask yet another question on what kind of illusion exactly are these guys talking about (despite I have an intuition whatever it is it must be an equal absurdity)? And I think you still take light of the implications because under this account, we are not wrong about just verification, we would be wrong about everything and anything. It is a suicide! | |
| Sep 18, 2023 at 7:05 | answer | added | Olivier5 | timeline score: 4 | |
| Sep 18, 2023 at 6:35 | comment | added | Conifold | This was already addressed in your previous question. It was noticed by all sides of the debate, the "illusion" is not meant as normally understood, and as understood, although counterintuitive and far fetched, it does not amount to an absurdity. If we are mistaken about existence of mental states and consciousness we are all the more mistaken about the process of verification and the actual basis for it, which is something else (physical, presumably). It is extraordinary, but not contradictory. So what is new here? | |
| Sep 18, 2023 at 6:27 | comment | added | J Kusin | Illusion about consciousness could mean our raw phenomenological mental states are heavily transduced versions of the outside world or that any kind of meta analysis of phenomenological states is fraught (or varying degrees of the above). These are not total epistemic disasters and they can be arrived at without contradiction. I turn to evolutionary fitness for the transduction and the changing manifest image turned introspectively for the meta illusion. We were not dualistic prior to Descartes about own manifest self images | |
| Sep 18, 2023 at 6:17 | comment | added | Double Knot | Indeed eliminativists such as Churchland would agree eliminative claim 'consciousness is an illusion' itself is an illusion, anyway it's just a claim not something displayed naturally in the sky out there. And re your "if I claim that consciousness is an illusion, it extends to all my mental states. Therefore I lose any basis for checking whether anything else is true or not including this very doctrine", it may need be more cautious here and not rush to such an extreme conclusion since one's illusion is not arbitrary but naturally selected and useful to the persistence of the said being... | |
| Sep 18, 2023 at 5:57 | history | edited | infatuated | CC BY-SA 4.0 |
edited body; edited title
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| Sep 18, 2023 at 5:51 | history | asked | infatuated | CC BY-SA 4.0 |