RE: Michael Graziano's theory of consciousness

Mon, 13 Apr 2015 10:30:08 -0700 

 

 

From: [email protected] 
[mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of Telmo Menezes
Sent: Monday, April 13, 2015 7:49 AM
To: [email protected]
Subject: Re: Michael Graziano's theory of consciousness

 

 

 

On Mon, Apr 13, 2015 at 2:55 PM, Bruce Kellett <[email protected]> 
wrote:

Bruno Marchal wrote:

On 13 Apr 2015, at 05:31, Bruce Kellett wrote:

The philosophical literature is full of extended discussions on this, and it is 
widely understood that ideas such as brain transplants and duplicating machines 
play merry havoc with our intuitive notions of personal identity.


Yes, it simply vanish. Personal identity is an illusion, but the FPI is not, 
and that result is not used in the reversal, so I prefer to let is for other 
threads and topics.


That seems like a flat contradiction. Personal identity is an illusion but 
First Person Indeterminacy is not. You can't have first person anything if you 
do not have a notion of personal identity.

I am actually very suspicious of any argument which begins, or ends, with "X is 
an illusion." Be X consciousness, personal identity, free will, space, time, or 
anything else. The theory is supposed to explain our experience of these 
things. Writing them off as "illusions" is not an explanation.

 

Only if the theory fails to explain how the illusion arises. For example, there 
was a persistent illusion that the universe revolves around the earth. 
Astronomy eventually showed that not to be the case, also explaining why it 
looks that way.

 

Telmo – I agree with you. An argument for something being an illusion needs to 
show how the illusion emerges out of the underlying reality; it needs to 
demonstrate the mechanisms that drive the illusion and how they work to 
transform the actual real events/experiences/etc. into whatever is subsequently 
perceived as experienced or real. Simply saying that something is an illusion 
is not adequate; I agree with that. And I think your example of the 
Aristotelian earth centric universe, is a good one. The mechanism by which it 
produced the illusion was demonstrated in that case.

Chris

 

Telmo.

 



Bruce



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