Re: Trust, Consciousness, Dennett, Lem: was: another new language to check out

Sally Caves scripsit:

> And yes, too, I've
> contemplated the notion off and on in my salad days that I'm the only one to
> exist, since I cannot fathom other people's subjectivities, but I've
> discarded that solipsistic notion as you seem to have, too.
Or as Bertrand Russell's friend told him (but he doesn't seem to have
gotten her joke):  "Of course I'm a solipsist!  Isn't everybody?"

> Dennett's _Consciousness Explained_ seems
> like an almost laughably arrogant title.  (I can't remember what it argues;
> I read it on the run years ago, and agreed with much of it, but:)
> _Consciousness Interrogated_?  _Consciousness Investigated_?  Consciousness
> is a mysterious thing to me.  Something almost impossible to "explain."
The trouble is that there are all too many philosophers out there who
believe that Consciousness (capital C) is not only unexplained but
unexplainable.  Dennett's title, like many of his rhetorical strategies
("We're all [philosophical] zombies", e.g.) are a Western analogue of
the Zen attempt to "break the mind of logic" -- to shake people out of
their dogmatic slumbers.

One of the chapters is "Qualia, Disqualified", which explains how it is that
qualia, the ineffable properties of things that make us experience them the
way we do and not otherwise (the inward experience of redness or sourness, e.g.),
over which so many philosophers have spilled ink for decades, simply don't
exist in the sense meant.  Dennett comes along with his pin and just pricks
the balloon.  Of course, his intended targets never notice: using the rhetorical
strategy of the Tortoise in Lewis Carroll's dialogue, they just reduce his
claim that there are no qualia to another theory of qualia.

And so, with a hearty laugh, the monk became enlightened.

--
"We are lost, lost.  No name, no business, no Precious, nothing.  Only empty.
Only hungry: yes, we are hungry.  A few little fishes, nassty bony little
fishes, for a poor creature, and they say death.  So wise they are; so just,
so very just."  --Gollum        jcowan@reutershealth.com  www.ccil.org/~cowan