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I apologize for not responding to the rest of the post, but I wanted to zero in on what seems to be a disagreement of fact rather than a disagreement of opinion.
This would seem to indicate that you already disagree with the illusionists. Illusionists believe that nothing is conscious, and nothing ever will be conscious, because consciousness does not exist. Therefore, you hold a philosophical view (that illusionism is false).
Earlier in the thread you said:
This is itself a philosophical view. There are philosophers who do believe that objective morality exists. So, it appears that you believe that your own claim is true, and their claims are false.
You previously claimed that Searle's Chinese Room does know how to speak Chinese. So you think Searle's claim that the room doesn't know how to speak Chinese is false. And you think that your own view is true.
In this post you claimed that GPT-4 had a genuine understanding of truth, and that p-zombies are an incoherent concept, both philosophical claims.
So you have a long history of making many philosophical claims. You appear to assert these claims because you believe that they are correct, because they correspond to the facts of reality; so it naturally seems to follow that you think that anyone who denies these claims would be saying something incorrect, and opposed to the facts of reality. I don't see how the concept of a "category error" enters anywhere into it. So "The only way a philosophical conjecture can be incorrect is through logical error in its formulation, or outright self-contradiction" is false. They can be incorrect because they fail to correspond to the facts of reality.
Unless you want to claim "there isn't even such a thing as a philosophical problem, because all of my beliefs are so obviously correct that any reasonable person would have to share all my beliefs, and all the opposing claims are so radically wrong that they're category errors", which is... basically just a particularly aggressive phrasing of the old "all my beliefs are obviously right and all my opponents' beliefs are obviously wrong" thing, although it would still fundamentally be in line with my original point.
The point is that you can't escape from philosophy, you're engaging in it all the time whether you realize it or not (in fact the two of us engaged in a protracted philosophical argument in that final linked post).
Hmm.. It seems that my wording was imprecise. Reflecting on it, I guess the best explanation is that I think that frameworks, specifically in moral philosophy are unfalsifiable. There is nothing intrinsically superior about being Kantian or Utilitarian, to entities that aren't swayed by practical considerations.
In other cases, I think it is eminently possible to say that certain "philosophical" claims are, in fact false, because they don't hold up in the face of empirical scrutiny or are based off faulty premises.
In those scenarios: I've made factual claims about these topics. I believe Searle is wrong about the Chinese Room, that illusionists are wrong about consciousness, and that moral realists are wrong about the nature of morality. I believe they are wrong not because they have a different "perspective," but because their models of reality are, in my estimation, incorrect. They make claims that are either inconsistent with a physicalist worldview or are simply less parsimonious than the alternative.
Let's take the Chinese Room. My claim that the system as a whole understands Chinese is a functionalist hypothesis. It is a claim about what "understanding" is at a physical level. I posit that understanding is not a magical, indivisible essence, but a complex process of information manipulation.
Searle's argument is pure sleight-of-hand that works by focusing our attention on a single component: the man who cannot understand Chinese, while glossing over the fact that the man is merely the CPU. The system's "understanding" resides in the total architecture. To say the system doesn't understand because the man doesn't is like saying a computer can't calculate a sum because a single transistor has no concept of arithmetic (or my usual go-to, that no individual neuron in a human brain speaks English). Searle's argument only works if you presuppose that understanding must be a property of a single, irreducible component, which is precisely the non-physicalist assumption I reject. My position is a testable model of cognition, his relies on an appeal to "intrinsic intentionality," a property he never defines in a falsifiable way.
The same logic applies to my rejection of p-zombies. The concept of a philosophical zombie is, in my view, physically incoherent. It presumes that consciousness (or "qualia") is an optional extra, a layer of paint that can be applied or withheld from a physically identical object. This is closet dualism. At least real dualists are honest about their kooky beliefs.
My hypothesis is that consciousness is (likely) what a certain kind of complex information processing feels like from the inside. It's an emergent property of the physical system, not a separate substance or field that interacts with it. You cannot have a physically identical replica of a conscious human, down to the last quantum state, that lacks consciousness, for the same reason you cannot have a physically identical replica of a fire that lacks heat. The heat is a macro-level property of the underlying molecular motion.
Likewise, consciousness is a macro-level property of the underlying neural computation. To claim otherwise is to make a claim that violates what we know about physical cause and effect. Again, this is not a "perspective"; it is a hypothesis about the identity of mind and specific physical processes.
Finally, coming to "objective" morality. My claim that it does not exist is an empirical one, based on the lack of evidence. It is a claim about the contents of the universe. If moral realism is true, then moral facts must exist somewhere. Are they physical laws? Are they non-physical entities that somehow interact with our brains? The burden of proof is on the realist to show me the data, to point to the objective moral truth in a way that is distinguishable from a deeply felt human preference. Absent that evidence, the most parsimonious explanation is that "morality" is a complex set of evolved behaviors, game-theoretic strategies, and cultural constructs. It is real in the same way that "money" or "governments" are real, as a shared social reality, but not in the way that "gravity" is real.
So yes, I engage in philosophy. But I do so with the conviction that these are not merely questions for eternal debate. They are unsolved scientific problems. (In some cases, they might not even be solvable, such as the issue of infinite regress)
My positions are hypotheses about the nature of reality, and I hold them because I believe they are the most physically plausible and parsimonious explanations available.
I believe that this position is tantamount to philosophical naturalism, but correct me if I'm wrong.
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