[FRIAM] Is consciousness a mystery? (used to be "mystery...deeper".T

[Jon Zingale]

Before questing for El Dorado, some caveats:
1. I cannot participate as deeply as I otherwise would because I have a
pile of work I need to apply myself to.

2. It appears to me that there would be value in a pre-discussion survey
where willing participants answered scalar valued questions (strongly
disagree..strongly agree, NA) regarding their beliefs about consciousness.
Questions could include: consciousness is a thing, consciousness is a
heritable trait, consciousness is given by the material world, One exhibits
degrees of consciousness, Language is necessary for consciousness,
propositional logic is a useful tool for the analysis of consciousness,
consciousness is the same thing as subjective experience, etc... The hope
would then be to understand what people expect from the conversation and to
make coping with another's perspective easier (localizing another's hut).
Perhaps we could start with pooling a set of questions to ask one another?

My personal preferences include ideas not that dissimilar to Eric's. I tend
to rely on the idea that others made of the same kind of stuff as me likely
have experiences similar to my own. I feel that the burden of proof is on
those that postulate p-zombies (or any other anti-object) and that they
ought to not only provide these objects, but show me how they can be
anything but transient here in this world. I wish to give privileged
ontological status to those that have struggled and fought to exist here in
the world. While I enjoy counterfactuals as much as the next nerd, it is
difficult enough to study and understand what is already here.

Like Brouwer and others, I find existence claims mostly unsatisfying. While
it may be the case that we experience stuff, it may also be the case that
we cannot reason solely from the data provided by this claim. This happens
quite a lot in analytic traditions (formal philosophy, mathematics, logic,
etc...), so my mentioning it should not be too controversial or over
anyone's head.

Anyway, that is what I have for now.
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