[FRIAM] Warring Darwinians for Glen, Steve

[uǝlƃ ☣]

This seems to contradict what you've said about it being impossible to doubt everything. If I recall the argument, you would say that launching into an action like putting your leg down to get out of bed or jumping a creek or whatever *means* you fully believe (don't doubt) that the floor is there and/or you can jump over the creek. In the situation below, you genuinely doubt whether or not you'll pick up the wad of paper.

If I try to steelman your response, I guess you'll say something like "Right. I don't doubt everything, only conscious things." But if you *did* respond that way, then I win the argument because my objection to your argument was that we do doubt everything, but doubt is a matter of degree, not kind. When doubt is very near zero, maybe you're barely conscious of it, e.g. breathing, you can be pretty sure you'll take the next breath. But if you hold your breath and make the next breath a conscious act, then you're unsure whether you'll take that next breath.

But I think all this is unrelated to the "hard problem", which is all about "what it's like to be some one/thing". If anyone should understand the hard problem, it should be you. >8^D You made the argument in a recent discussion that you use metaphor to bridge the gap between what you know and what others might know ... to pretend a little bit to understand their knowledge even if you don't have tacit knowledge of that thing by mapping it to what you do know. That *is* imagining what it's like to be that other person. Your metaphors are an attempt to *solve* the hard problem.

My rejection of your metaphors reflect my belief that the hard problem cannot be solved. The best we can do is *simulate* one another.

On 4/28/20 3:54 PM, thompnickson2 at gmail.com wrote:
> I am not writing a book about the hard problem of consciousness because I have never understood what the hard problem of consciousness IS.  Maybe I am not conscious in the way the rest of you are?   For instance, when I miss the wastebasket with a piece of paper I am genuinely unsure whether I am going to get up from my chair and go put it in, or … um …. leave it there for somebody else to pick up.   Once I start to get up from my chair, I am pretty sure, but, hey, if the phone rang at that moment, I might never get across the room, and the wad of paper might still be there the next morning for my wife to cite as further evidence of my male callousness.  The rest of you seem to think that you KNOW what you are going to do in advance of doing it.  If that has anything to do with the hard problem of consciousness, I don’t have that problem.
> 
> By the way, my wife KNOWS and will tell  you with alacrity, that whatever I might say, I was NEVER going to pick that piece of paper up.  As evidence, she points to the pile of wadded up pieces of  paper wadded around the wastebasket. 

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