Joe Carlsmith

I'm not trying to be dismissive about the notion of consciousness.

I just think we should be quite aware of how, it seems to me, how ongoingly confused we are about its nature.

So there's a class of people who are called illusionists in philosophy of mind, who will say consciousness does not exist.

And this is sort of...

sort of it's different ways to understand this view.

Um, but one, one version is to sort of say that the concept of consciousness has built into it too many preconditions that aren't met by the real world.

So we should sort of chuck it out like Ilan Vitale, like instead of the sort of proposal is kind of like, um, at least phenomenal consciousness, right.

Or like qualia or what it's like to be a thing.

Um, they'll just say, this is, this is like sufficiently broken, sufficiently chock full of falsehoods that we should just not use it.

I think there... It feels to me like... I am like... There's really clearly a thing... There's something going on with... Are you... Like, I'm kind of really not...

I kind of expect to, I do actually kind of expect to continue to care about something like consciousness quite a lot on reflection, um, and to not, uh, kind of end up deciding that my ethics is like better.

It like doesn't make any reference to that, or at least like there's some things like quite nearby to consciousness, you know, like when I, I stubbed my toe and I have this, like something happens when I stubbed my toe, unclear exactly what, how to name it, but I'm like something about that, you know, I'm like pretty focused on.

And so I do think, um,

you know, in some sense, if you're, if you feel like, well, where do things go?

I'm like, I should be clear.

I have a bunch of credence that in the end we end up caring a bunch about consciousness just directly.

Um, and so, uh, if we don't like, yeah, I mean, where will ethics go?

Where will like a completed philosophy of mind go?

Very hard, very hard to say.

I mean, I can imagine something that's more, um, like, I think, I mean, maybe a thing that I think a move that