What brudgers is saying is that there is no proof that can be made that anyone is conscious but yourself. Sure, you can experience love and feelings that lead you to believe that this partner of yours is conscious, and other people are.. But ultimately, there is a HUGE difference and leap of assumption between consciousness and reactiveness. We know animals are reactive. We only know that our self-being is conscious.
Obviously these are Matrix-type thoughts. I am just trying to explain brudgers point.
That's the direction a philosophical skeptic might head. But my point is more rooted in language; in 20th century Cambridge rather than 18th century Edinburgh - in Wittgenstein not David Hume.
Once we start talking about consciousness we're outside the realm of Newton's billiards balls and calculus. We're into psychology and navigating a linguistic sea full of terminology that owes more to Chaucer than Roger Bacon. A call for a larger sample size isn't going to give us a mathematical demonstration of any property of consciousness - it's just going to give us a claim on a larger confidence interval. It's going to make us feel better about our beliefs not show why they are correct.
I guess my point is that psychology is disjoint from 'classical science's simply because we cannot abstract its subject matter out of ordinary language and into mathematics. That doesn't mean we can't investigate it, just that we need to recognize the limitations imposed by the tools at our disposal. In programming terms, it's a ball of mud. Standardizing test conditions for investigating consciousness probably requires assumptions about states of consciousness upfront, e.g. sleeping, drowsy, awake, alert, and distracted. It probably relies on our nonscientific intuitions as well - trees and earthworms are right out and we're a long way from having the tools to investigate what it is like to be a bat in a scientific manner that feels continuous with the scientific method as applied in a field such as chemistry.
It's bloody-stupid is what it is. If you understood how your own consciousness works on a scientific level, you would know exactly what evidence to check for in other people to know whether they're conscious or not. You could perform a simple medical test to find out if someone's a p-zombie (hint: they definitely aren't).
You clearly aren't very introspective, too bad. That doesn't warrant the idea as bloody stupid. You cannot verify consciousness, only reactiveness. Maybe you are confused by medical consciousness versus consciousness in a real sense. Medical consciousness only means reactiveness, it's a misnomer
'It's only appearances' skepticism always includes "to me". It only works by induction on the skeptic's solipsism. The difficulty of your position is compounded by HN's interface - even the claim "it appears to me that you are made of meat" is implausible.
Even with solipsism you can easily say that I'm made of meat. On the other hand, saying your consciousness is entirely meat-based is hugely addumptive. You will not know until you are dead, if there's something more.
Conscious in a medical sense, where the brain acts as if it has separate consciousness, yes. But that's not what this problem is about.
Rather it is about consciousness in the philosophical sense, that starts with the question of whether or not anything outside of your own consciousness even exists, and if we posit the existence of a real world, whether or not other seemingly thinking, self-aware, conscious entities exists that are able to experience consciousness.
Since we don't know what gives rise to this form of consciousness, it is not evident whether or not there will ever be any evidence to determine whether they are conscious or not in that sense.
I believe Eli is coming from a position of: reality is made up of things that can be studied, and rules that are universal, and those things and rules are what gives rise to consciousness in me. If I understand the process that gives rise to consciousness in me, I can look at other people's brains and see whether the process would apply in them as well.
"Consciousness in the philosophical sense", to the extent that it's a meaningful thing to talk about, is part of reality.
>"Consciousness in the philosophical sense", to the extent that it's a meaningful thing to talk about, is part of reality.
Stronger statement: "consciousness in the philosophical sense" is either part of reality, or a meaningless construct invented by philosophers to justify metaphysical speculations, thus obtaining job security by having a permanent claim that some phenomenon actually exists that can never be reduced to science.
If you understood how your own consciousness works on a scientific level, you would know exactly what evidence to check for in other people
Leaving aside the difficulties in unpacking the idea of scientific introspection under the classical rubric of experiment as observation, once one decomposes consciousness to where a scientific level can be extracted, there's a corpse on the table not a patient. The whole gist of consciousness is that it's unified and once we admit a distinct 'scientific level' we ought to own up to what we have done and say "by consciousness I don't mean what is ordinarily meant, but instead I mean exactly 'x,y,z' and therefore my claims are not about consciousness in general but about this special definition."
And there's nothing wrong with that, and it might be useful.
To continue with the above thread, wouldn't Wittgenstein's response to this be something along the lines of: if scientifically dissecting consciousness results in a corpse, is it correct to say there was a body in the first place? Think of the question, "How does Helios pull the Sun across the sky?" After dissection, we resolve to question the question, not answer it.
See the "Mary's room" thought experiment. Thinking and reasoning about all the measurable properties of a phenomenon is way different than experiencing them. This doesn't necessarily mean that subjective perceptions have an immaterial existence, but it provides an approach to analyzing the mind that can't be achieved by physical measurement alone.
A better question would be "how can you try to understand consciousness without instrospection?" Studying consciousness merely by performing brain scans and electroencephalograms, without asking the subject what she's experiencing, would surely provide a poor and incomplete perspective.
Obviously these are Matrix-type thoughts. I am just trying to explain brudgers point.