I don’t know where you get the idea that these guys are dualists. Maybe Chalmers, but I don’t think so. My favorites are Nagel and Searle, and neither is a dualist or a neo-Cartesian. Their main contribution, I believe, is simply to show how silly the computational theory of mind is. Dennet may be easier to read because he professes something which inspires the imagination, and is easy to digest, since it doesn’t conform to the truth.
mtlmtlmtlmtl|3 years ago
The hard problem of consciousness is an inherently dualist conception.
Goff for instance subscribes to the patently absurd view of panpsychism, where matter is posited to have subjective experience "built in" somehow. This is such an absurd view. He first posits that there must be some fundamental subjective experience. But then he can't actually come up with a cogent theory for it, so he then just posits that mind is fundamental to matter. So he's effectively just inventing new properties of nature out of whole cloth. But then even still he has no solid conception of what those properties are, what they do or how they interact to form a conscious mind in a brain. How is any of this helpful in any way? He took one dubious problem and projected it onto the entire universe, and gave himself another problem of emergence to boot. This is not progress, more like digging a hole for himself.
As for Searle, I'm not hugely familiar with his work, but I find his Chinese Room experiment, or rather his conclusions about it, misguided at best and wilfully ignorant at worst. The system reply, which I think is just obviously true, is simply dismissed with very little argument.
Again, I fail to find justification for fundamentally subjective experience other than it sure feels that way. That's more of a theological argument than a philosophical one.
The idea that Dennet is easier to read because he doesn't conform to the truth is pretty strange. He's clearly a very skilled writer and speaker. He's very good at avoiding a dense jungle of -isms, and when he does use them, he defines them very precicely and carefully. This to me is good philosophy. Dennet does a good job of laying out and explaining these ideas in a way that isn't completely convoluted. Argument is the core methodology of philosophy, and if a philosopher fails to represent their argument in clear way, why should I even take them seriously?
Philosophers are great at dressing up bad arguments in fancy, mystical, ill-defined terminology like "qualia". This to me is the philosophical equivalent of code smell. Whenever I read these closet dualists' arguments I have to pinch my nose.
whittingtonaaon|3 years ago