another word for advanced cogntive science courses

If we do that, the champions of phenomenal experience have nothing to offer all they can do is, as Pete Mandik puts it here, gesture towards phenomenal properties. Perhaps we should just listen to the ‘tales of the qualophiles’ – there is something it is like, Mary knows something new, I could have a zombie twin – and just say a plain ‘no’ to all of them. There’s something to be said for the bracing elegance of the two-word formulation of scepticism offered by Dennett (who provides a robustly supportive response to illusionism here, as being the default case) – ‘What qualia?’. One reason the whole issue is so difficult is that it’s hard to see one’s way through the dense thicket of clarifications thrown up by philosophers, all demanding to be addressed and straightened out. There is a danger that the illusion itself becomes a new topic and inadvertently builds the confusion further.

In one way I wonder whether it isn’t better to stick with raw scepticism than frame the whole thing in terms of an illusion. It aims to replace the question of what phenomenal experience is, with the question of why people have the illusion of phenomenal experience. Illusionism denies that our experiences have the phenomenal aspect they seem to have it is in essence a sceptical case about phenomenal experience. How can consciousness be an illusion? Surely an illusion is itself a conscious state – a deceptive one – so that the reality of consciousness is a precondition of anything being an illusion? Illusionism, of course, is not talking about the practical, content-bearing kind of consciousness, but about phenomenal consciousness, qualia, the subjective side, what it is like to see something. In a really cracking issue of the JCS (possibly the best I’ve read) Keith Frankish sets out and defends the thesis of illusionism, with a splendid array of responses from supporters and others.

Consciousness – it’s all been a terrible mistake.

Another word for advanced cogntive science courses