[mtlmtlmtlmtl]

If only we had more than one person... Jokes aside:

By studying how that "internal world" emerges from the anatomy of the brain(neuroscience, neuropharmacology).

By querying that internal world in various interesting ways and studying the responses(psychology and behavioral biology).

By studying the theory of computation and its physical constraints(computer science, mathematics, physics).

And by studying language and its implications for cognition(linguistics).

Philosophers can't just sit in a bubble and figure this shit out on their own. They've tried that for milennia. At the very least their theories need to be physically, neurologically, and computationally possible...

Obviously science has things to say about these questions, even Chalmers would concede that.

I pose you a question. Can you prove, or suggest a way of discerning, whether this internal world, impenetrable to outside probing, actually exists? If you can't, do you think it's reasonable to stop all attempts at scientific inquiry without proof that it's hopeless?

[whittingtonaaon]

This is just full of ontological and epistemological assumptions which have been mainstream for a few decades but are very controversial among philosophers. Philosophers don’t sit in bubbles—and use all the evidence they can find—and make great contributions to knowledge, even though what they do is not science. There’s a reason there are other subjects besides chemistry and physics.

[mtlmtlmtlmtl]

Right, philosophers avail themselves of science all the time. Good ones do, anyway. But you were claiming science has no bearing on consciousness, yet even non-physicalists like Nagel heavily cite scientific knowledge. So which one is it?

I'm not on some crusade against the field of philosophy. Certainly philosophy has contributed mightily, and continues to do so. But I think physicalists like Dennet are making far more tangible contributions. Reading Dennet has been enlightening to me, he's one of the only philosophers I've found who can actually explain his philosophy to non-philosophers.

Chalmers on the other hand reads like a philosopher chasing his own homonculus. I don't find his arguments very clear and when I do manage to decipher him it seems to boil down to a stubborn insistence that fundamentally subjective experience must exist just because it sure as hell feels that way. I just don't see what the epistemic value is in keeping this neo-dualist baggage around. I don't see what it brings to the table. I see nothing that it explains that makes it necessary.

[whittingtonaaon]

I don’t know where you get the idea that these guys are dualists. Maybe Chalmers, but I don’t think so. My favorites are Nagel and Searle, and neither is a dualist or a neo-Cartesian. Their main contribution, I believe, is simply to show how silly the computational theory of mind is. Dennet may be easier to read because he professes something which inspires the imagination, and is easy to digest, since it doesn’t conform to the truth.

[mtlmtlmtlmtl]

If you reject physicalism, you must posit some non-physical "stuff" or mechanism to explain the "qualia" that you reject as being physical. That is inherently dualism. But dualism is a dirty word in philosophy these days, so thwy don't call themselves as much.

The hard problem of consciousness is an inherently dualist conception.

Goff for instance subscribes to the patently absurd view of panpsychism, where matter is posited to have subjective experience "built in" somehow. This is such an absurd view. He first posits that there must be some fundamental subjective experience. But then he can't actually come up with a cogent theory for it, so he then just posits that mind is fundamental to matter. So he's effectively just inventing new properties of nature out of whole cloth. But then even still he has no solid conception of what those properties are, what they do or how they interact to form a conscious mind in a brain. How is any of this helpful in any way? He took one dubious problem and projected it onto the entire universe, and gave himself another problem of emergence to boot. This is not progress, more like digging a hole for himself.

As for Searle, I'm not hugely familiar with his work, but I find his Chinese Room experiment, or rather his conclusions about it, misguided at best and wilfully ignorant at worst. The system reply, which I think is just obviously true, is simply dismissed with very little argument.

Again, I fail to find justification for fundamentally subjective experience other than it sure feels that way. That's more of a theological argument than a philosophical one.

The idea that Dennet is easier to read because he doesn't conform to the truth is pretty strange. He's clearly a very skilled writer and speaker. He's very good at avoiding a dense jungle of -isms, and when he does use them, he defines them very precicely and carefully. This to me is good philosophy. Dennet does a good job of laying out and explaining these ideas in a way that isn't completely convoluted. Argument is the core methodology of philosophy, and if a philosopher fails to represent their argument in clear way, why should I even take them seriously?

Philosophers are great at dressing up bad arguments in fancy, mystical, ill-defined terminology like "qualia". This to me is the philosophical equivalent of code smell. Whenever I read these closet dualists' arguments I have to pinch my nose.

[whittingtonaaon]

It’s like, people with scientistic views, praising objectivity, claiming that consciousness doesn’t exist, come out with conclusions like “a system understands Chinese.” I’m afraid I find this so ludicrous that I can’t continue the discussion on a civil level.

[mtlmtlmtlmtl]

I never claimed consciousness doesn't exist, just that it doesn't require magical homunculi and wonderstuff to work. Also, that's pretty much Searle's response too. Not very convincing when philosophers are even unwilling to make an argument.