Eric Schwitzgebel

speaker

445 appearances 1 recordings 1 series first heard Jun 2011 last heard Jun 2011

Eric Schwitzgebel’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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New Books in Philosophy · Eric Schwitzgebel, “Perplexities of Consciousness” (MIT Press, 2011) · 15 Jun 2011 podcast

So if you're trying to tag down what are the neural correlates of consciousness, I think, in fact, every view that's been proposed has as a starting assumption either a sparse or an abundant or some sort of moderate view of basically how cheaply consciousness can be achieved.

Yes, right now I think all these theories beg the question.

I have not seen anything even close to evidence.

If you're someone who's committed, as I think is reasonable on the table, if you're someone who's attracted to an abundant view, then I have not seen any evidence or anything even close to evidence that

for those who advocate sparse views of consciousness, that should move you from your abundant view.

You could say, oh, well, that's not a view.

Those aren't the neural correlates of consciousness.

Those are the neural correlates, say, of consciousness while you're attending, or they're the neural correlates of attention, or they're neural correlates of reportability under certain conditions.

But consciousness, if you're abundant, it's a lot easier to attain than that.

And vice versa for people who have abundant views of the metaphysics or of the neural correlates of consciousness.

I don't think there's anything they've said that should convince, that should win someone over who is attracted to a sparse view.

Right.

So, yes, my skepticism is about the short to the medium term, maybe the next next two or three decades, maybe farther down the road is so hard to see.

I mean, I'm nervous about making I don't see how it can be resolved.

But I'm also very aware of the fact that scientists are pretty clever, and naysayers about science have generally been proven wrong, or often been proven wrong over the long term.

So it's not an in-principle skepticism.

I don't have any reason to say there's no way this could be figured out.

But I think for the short to medium term,

things are looking... I don't see how people... how we can cross the divide between sparseness and abundance, either phylogenetically or how far does consciousness spread beyond attention.

I don't see how we can cross that divide.

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