On Wednesday, July 16, 2014 8:02:18 AM UTC-5, Craig Weinberg wrote: > > So often it becomes clear to me in debating the issues of consciousness > that they are missing something which cannot be replaced by logic. The way > that many people think, especially those who are very intelligent in math > and physics, only includes a kind of toy model of experience. ... This is > not to say that everyone who doesn't understand the hard problem has > mindblindness, but I would say it is very likely that having > mindreading-empathy deficits on the autistic spectrum would tend to result > in a strong bias against idealism, panpsychism, free will, or the hard > problem of consciousness. >
That's an interesting autism study. Regarding your above speculations about "consciousness" debates, though, it's important to recognize that this is a fully reversible criticism. On the one side, empathy deficits might incline people to have a bias against idealism and so on. But on the other side, those people could equally well speculate that idealists are suffering from biases caused by overactive agency detection and an inaccurate but biologically hardwired theory-of-mind. These kind of fully reversible criticisms come up a lot whenever we're tempted to speculate about the psychological genesis of people's beliefs. Some other examples include: * Some Christians tell atheists that they're only atheists because they want to sin. This is easily reversed to atheists telling Christians that they're only Christians because they want others to want others to think they are righteous. * Some liberals tell conservatives that they're only conservatives because they hate minorities/women/poor people/etc. This is easily reversed to conservatives telling liberals that they're only liberals because they're minorities/women/poor people/etc and they are just going along with the others in that group because of shared 'tribal' sentiment. The primary point is that psychological explanations of other's beliefs, whether the explanations are correct or not, aren't actually relevant to determining the truth or falsity of the beliefs. The secondary point is that, when we find ourselves tempted to psychologize others rather than address their criticisms, all we achieve is propagating prejudice. Gabe -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Everything List" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected]. To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
