This Strawson piece just appeared in the NY Times.<\/p>\n
It’s a position that I found attractive long ago.\u00a0 FWIW, I preferred Strawson’s father as a philosopher but I give the son some credit for consistently pushing this position for years.\u00a0 (IIRC, correctly, he also has no sympathy for compatibalism, and is an old-fashioned hard determinist.<\/p>\n
What do y’all think?<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
An excerpt:<\/p>\n
Every day, it seems, some verifiably intelligent person tells us that we don\u2019t know what consciousness is. The nature of consciousness, they say, is an awesome mystery. It\u2019s the ultimate hard problem. The current Wikipedia entry is typical: Consciousness \u201cis the most mysterious aspect of our lives\u201d; philosophers \u201chave struggled to comprehend the nature of consciousness.\u201d<\/p>\n
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I find this odd because we know exactly what consciousness is \u2014 where by \u201cconsciousness\u201d I mean what most people mean in this debate: experience of any kind whatever. It\u2019s the most familiar thing there is, whether it\u2019s experience of emotion, pain, understanding what someone is saying, seeing, hearing, touching, tasting or feeling. It is in fact the only thing in the universe whose ultimate intrinsic nature we can claim to know. It is utterly unmysterious.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
(Edited by Neil Rickert, to avoid possible copyright problems).<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
This Strawson piece just appeared in the NY Times. Consciousness Isn\u2019t a Mystery. It\u2019s Matter. It’s a position that I found attractive long ago.\u00a0 FWIW, I preferred Strawson’s father as a philosopher but I give the son some credit for … Continue reading