Brian’s view is maybe best described as eliminativism about consciousness (which may already seem counterintuitive to many) plus a counterintuitive way to draw boundaries in concept space.
Luke Muehlhauser said about Brian’s way of assigning non-zero moral relevance to any process that remotely resembles aspects of our concept of consciousness:
“Mr. Tomasik’s view [...] amounts to pansychism about consciousness as an uninformative special case of “pan-everythingism about everything.”
So the disagreement there does not appear to be about questions such as “What produces people’s impression of there being a hard problem of consciousness?,” but rather whether anything that is “non-infinitely separated in multi-dimensional concept space” still deserves some (tiny) recognition as fitting into the definition. As Luke says here, the concept “consciousness” works more like “life” (= fuzzy) and less like “water” (= H2O), and so if one shares this view, it becomes non-trivial to come up with an all-encompassing definition.
While most (? my impression anyway as someone who works there) researchers at FRI place highest credence on functionalism and eliminativism, there is more skepticism about Brian’s inclination to never draw hard boundaries in concept space.
While most (? my impression anyway as someone who works there) researchers at FRI place highest credence on functionalism and eliminativism, there is more skepticism about Brian’s inclination to never draw hard boundaries in concept space.
It would be interesting to see FRI develop what ‘suffering-focused ethics, as informed by functionalism/eliminativism, but with hard boundaries in concept space’ might look like.
Brian’s view is maybe best described as eliminativism about consciousness (which may already seem counterintuitive to many) plus a counterintuitive way to draw boundaries in concept space. Luke Muehlhauser said about Brian’s way of assigning non-zero moral relevance to any process that remotely resembles aspects of our concept of consciousness:
“Mr. Tomasik’s view [...] amounts to pansychism about consciousness as an uninformative special case of “pan-everythingism about everything.”
See this conversation.
So the disagreement there does not appear to be about questions such as “What produces people’s impression of there being a hard problem of consciousness?,” but rather whether anything that is “non-infinitely separated in multi-dimensional concept space” still deserves some (tiny) recognition as fitting into the definition. As Luke says here, the concept “consciousness” works more like “life” (= fuzzy) and less like “water” (= H2O), and so if one shares this view, it becomes non-trivial to come up with an all-encompassing definition.
While most (? my impression anyway as someone who works there) researchers at FRI place highest credence on functionalism and eliminativism, there is more skepticism about Brian’s inclination to never draw hard boundaries in concept space.
It would be interesting to see FRI develop what ‘suffering-focused ethics, as informed by functionalism/eliminativism, but with hard boundaries in concept space’ might look like.