[jstanley]

This is exactly the kind of thing I was talking about.

How can you be remotely unsure about whether you are conscious? It is inconceivable to me that you could be conscious and unaware of it. It's an oxymoron.

Of course you can be unsure about whether others are conscious. But if you are conscious then you know that you are.

Do you experience things at all? Or are you a soulless machine that takes inputs and gives outputs and doesn't experience anything on the inside?

If the former, you're conscious and you know it.

[richardw]

We “experience” consciousness in the same way we experience hard objects that are actually made of mostly space. It feels right but it’s impossible to say that it’s the truth.

There are a lot of smart people who are less sure that our perceptions reflect reality. Free will, time, consciousness, space all feel very real. But when you interrogate them enough, those fall away. Go fast enough and your time slows down. Go as fast as a photon and time and distance disappear entirely. Yet we’re sure they’re real. At one point we absolutely knew the sun revolved around us. We could see it doing that daily.

One smart person on free will below. There are so many others. There’s certainly no consensus that “our experience = how things are”.

https://www.samharris.org/blog/the-illusion-of-free-will

The point is that our perception doesn’t provably equal “truth”. To make absolute statements you need to be a lot more sure and be more correct than all the smart people who say “not sure yet”.

[jstanley]

> The point is that our perception doesn’t provably equal “truth”.

That's fine, but that you have experiences at all proves that you have experiences.

I'm not saying nothing can be an illusion! I'm saying that consciousness specifically can't be an illusion, because if it was an illusion you wouldn't be experiencing anything at all.

[unparagoned]

You mentioned smart people and I wondered who you were talking about. Then you said Sam Harris who has a reputation for being a clueless idiot in philosophy circles.

Most philosophers are compatibilists, since that’s a good strong philosophical position. Harris is just saying libertarian free will doesn’t exist, but that’s irrelevant since that’s not what people really mean by the term.

[richardw]

I thought I might get pushback on the example. I honestly just googled and found a random person being Harris, but just add anyone who accepts spacetime/relativity and how it represents not what we experience. Or anyone who accepts that the mind predicts rather than observes reality, because our responses need to be faster than what we can process what we perceive. So even our direct perceptions are not quite exact.

The point, please focus on this point, is that it’s not a done deal that all accept free will. There exists a set of people who are smart and believe the opposite. I’m arguing against “everyone should think what I think”.

Edit: although to be honest if you convinced me otherwise I’d be 100% happy! “Most philosophers” (or my own “lots of smart people”) isn’t an argument I am moved by but I’ll go read up. My personal view is that the disappearance of time at the speed of light is incredibly powerful. I don’t feel we’ve explored the implications of that nearly enough. It either means the future impacts the past or super determinism is correct. Is there an alternative?