> But if you wanted to, wouldn't all the same criticisms people make about consciousness apply to [rocks]?
Not at all! It's fairly straightforward to play Taboo™ with the word "rock" and operationalize the term into consensus reality-level procedures. They tend to be hard (Mohs ≥1 or whatever), usually found lying around in groups, typica…
> But if you wanted to, wouldn't all the same criticisms people make about consciousness apply to [rocks]?
Not at all! It's fairly straightforward to play Taboo™ with the word "rock" and operationalize the term into consensus reality-level procedures. They tend to be hard (Mohs ≥1 or whatever), usually found lying around in groups, typically have XYZ palette of colors, and all manner of properties found in your friendly minerology textbook.
I'm pretty sure your reductionist worldview easily admits rocks as non-ontologically primitive objects. ☺
More to the point though, I'm claiming that "all the same criticisms people make about consciousness" apply to *elan vital*. At the very least, I think that should throw in some negative log-likelihood that "consciousness" has coherent extrinsics.
> Consciousness is an intuition that you'll have to take from my cold dead hands.
Hehe. Don't get me wrong. I'm not making the stronger claim that we're all just confused p-zombies and the word "consciousness" is completely empty. The color red still appears red; however, even "redness" can be dissected into more primitive perceptive qualia if you meditate on it a bit. Rather, I'm claiming that "consciousness" vaguely gestures at a collection of phenomena which don't form a particularly cohesive whole in the same way that calling Roger Penrose + banana smell + writer's block "ballingrin" doesn't make it a coherent concept.
> But if you wanted to, wouldn't all the same criticisms people make about consciousness apply to [rocks]?
Not at all! It's fairly straightforward to play Taboo™ with the word "rock" and operationalize the term into consensus reality-level procedures. They tend to be hard (Mohs ≥1 or whatever), usually found lying around in groups, typically have XYZ palette of colors, and all manner of properties found in your friendly minerology textbook.
I'm pretty sure your reductionist worldview easily admits rocks as non-ontologically primitive objects. ☺
More to the point though, I'm claiming that "all the same criticisms people make about consciousness" apply to *elan vital*. At the very least, I think that should throw in some negative log-likelihood that "consciousness" has coherent extrinsics.
> Consciousness is an intuition that you'll have to take from my cold dead hands.
Hehe. Don't get me wrong. I'm not making the stronger claim that we're all just confused p-zombies and the word "consciousness" is completely empty. The color red still appears red; however, even "redness" can be dissected into more primitive perceptive qualia if you meditate on it a bit. Rather, I'm claiming that "consciousness" vaguely gestures at a collection of phenomena which don't form a particularly cohesive whole in the same way that calling Roger Penrose + banana smell + writer's block "ballingrin" doesn't make it a coherent concept.