My hope was that the Type A-ness / subjectivity of the concept of “consciousness” I’m using would be clear from section 2.3.1 and 2.3.2, and then I can write paragraphs like the one above about fruit fly consciousness, which refers back to the subjective notion of consciousness introduced in section 2.3.
But really, I just find it very cumbersome to write in detail and at length about consciousness in a way that allows every sentence containing consciousness words to clearly be subjective / Type A-style consciousness. It’s similar to what I say in the report about fuzziness:
given that we currently lack such a detailed decomposition of “consciousness,” I reluctantly organize this report around the notion of “consciousness,” and I write about “which beings are conscious” and “which cognitive processes are conscious” and “when such-and-such cognitive processing becomes conscious,” while pleading with the reader to remember that I think the line between what is and isn’t “conscious” is extremely “fuzzy” (and as a consequence I also reject any clear-cut “Cartesian theater.”)
But then, throughout the report, I make liberal use of “normal” phrases about consciousness such as what’s conscious vs. not-conscious, “becoming” conscious or not conscious, what’s “in” consciousness or not, etc. It’s just really cumbersome to write in any other way.
Another point is that, well, I’m not just a subjectivist / Type A theorist about consciousness, but about nearly everything. So why shouldn’t we feel fine using more “normal” sentence structures to talk about consciousness, if we feel fine talking about “living things” and “mountains” and “sorting algorithms” and so on that way? I don’t have any trouble talking about the likelihood that there’s a mountain in such-and-such city, even though I think “mountain” is a layer of interpretation we cast upon the world.
That pragmatic approach makes sense and helps me understand your view better. Thanks! I do feel like the consequences of suggesting objectivism for consciousness are more significant than for “living things,” “mountains,” and even terms that are themselves very important like “factory farming.”
Consequences being things like (i) whether we get wrapped up in the ineffability/hard problem/etc. such that we get distracted from the key question (for subjectivists) of “What are the mental things we care about, and which beings have those?” and (ii) in the particular case of small minds (e.g. insects, simple reinforcement learners), whether we try to figure out their mental lives based on objectivist speculation (which, for subjectivists, is misguided) or force ourselves to decide what the mental things we care about are, and then thoughtfully evaluate small minds on that basis. I think evaluating small minds is where the objective/subjective difference really starts to matter.
Also, to a less extent, (iii) how much we listen to “expert” opinion outside of just people who are very familiar with the mental lives of the being in question, and (iv) unknown unknowns and keeping a norm of intellectual honesty, which seems to apply more to discussions of consciousness than of mountains/etc.
My hope was that the Type A-ness / subjectivity of the concept of “consciousness” I’m using would be clear from section 2.3.1 and 2.3.2, and then I can write paragraphs like the one above about fruit fly consciousness, which refers back to the subjective notion of consciousness introduced in section 2.3.
But really, I just find it very cumbersome to write in detail and at length about consciousness in a way that allows every sentence containing consciousness words to clearly be subjective / Type A-style consciousness. It’s similar to what I say in the report about fuzziness:
But then, throughout the report, I make liberal use of “normal” phrases about consciousness such as what’s conscious vs. not-conscious, “becoming” conscious or not conscious, what’s “in” consciousness or not, etc. It’s just really cumbersome to write in any other way.
Another point is that, well, I’m not just a subjectivist / Type A theorist about consciousness, but about nearly everything. So why shouldn’t we feel fine using more “normal” sentence structures to talk about consciousness, if we feel fine talking about “living things” and “mountains” and “sorting algorithms” and so on that way? I don’t have any trouble talking about the likelihood that there’s a mountain in such-and-such city, even though I think “mountain” is a layer of interpretation we cast upon the world.
That pragmatic approach makes sense and helps me understand your view better. Thanks! I do feel like the consequences of suggesting objectivism for consciousness are more significant than for “living things,” “mountains,” and even terms that are themselves very important like “factory farming.”
Consequences being things like (i) whether we get wrapped up in the ineffability/hard problem/etc. such that we get distracted from the key question (for subjectivists) of “What are the mental things we care about, and which beings have those?” and (ii) in the particular case of small minds (e.g. insects, simple reinforcement learners), whether we try to figure out their mental lives based on objectivist speculation (which, for subjectivists, is misguided) or force ourselves to decide what the mental things we care about are, and then thoughtfully evaluate small minds on that basis. I think evaluating small minds is where the objective/subjective difference really starts to matter.
Also, to a less extent, (iii) how much we listen to “expert” opinion outside of just people who are very familiar with the mental lives of the being in question, and (iv) unknown unknowns and keeping a norm of intellectual honesty, which seems to apply more to discussions of consciousness than of mountains/etc.