Dan said: > Isn't consciousness no better established than God and free will?
I'm not sure. There seem to be two obvious routes to an investigation of consciousness. Firstly, there is a Cartesian approach based on introspection. That is plenty good enough to convince me of the "vividness" of my conscious experiences. Secondly, there is Dennett's heterophenomenological method, which treats people's reports of their experiences of consciousness as the proper subjects of investigation. I'm moderately willing to grant on the basis of these heterophenomenonological testimonies that other people have the same kinds of vivid conscious experiences that I do. Now, though, for some caveats. I think that the argument above is shaky in several respects. Indeed, it seems that Dennett himself is arguing that we each trick ourselves into thinking that we have conscious experiences, so that we're all self-deluding zombies. In that case, I suppose consciousness is a theory we each invent about ourselves, which explains all the data but whose abstract structures don't map onto actual things "out there". Furthermore, I find it hard to imagine what sorts of structures in the world might be isomorphic to the "experiencelets" that make up our conscious experience - it almost seems to require a whole new physics of conscious experiences whose connection to the more familiar physics of particles and fields would be highly problematic. Rich GCU Tying Myself In Knots
