u/Messier_Mystic

Look, I get it, death has never been popular with anyone at any point in time in history. It is a very heavy weight to carry, being a sentient being that knows it's time is limited. I have nothing but boundless empathy for everyone because we are all ultimately in the same boat here; We are all going to die.

But even with that realization, I cannot help but be a little irked by the endless posts here about death, and how consciousness could somehow magically transcend it. And I don't think these posts really have anything to do with consciousness other than motivated reasoning and a potent(and understandable) fear of death.

Further, I actually think it's a disservice to the people asking these questions, many of them being people clearly dealing with grief and or fear of their own death, by humoring this topic. Especially since they could be pointed toward therapeutic resources for dealing with this reality.

I can't possibly be the only one who finds X numbered post about "Consciousness is Quantum Jazz, which makes it eternal" or some such silliness a bit irksome. It's not my place to gatekeep, but nonetheless I feel that these kinds of posts are both out of place and ultimately degrade the quality of the subreddit.

I'll be the first to happily admit life after death could be possible, and I would happily make the proclamation that I was wrong if evidence came out to support it. But let's be clear here; There is no controversy surrounding the idea that consciousness is a product of the brain. None. That is the standard operating assumption in science because that is what the evidence has thus far born out. If you want to make the case to the contrary, you need to present something that isn't just appeals to poorly understood quantum mechanics, a version of the Hard Problem even David Chalmers wouldn't endorse, or just really convoluted armchair philosophy.

This is not an appeal to have these kinds of posts banned. But I do think a conversation about them being out of place and better suited for somewhere else is in order.

TLDR: Our choices are only Illusionism or Idealism. Nothing else works, or could even work.

To preface this, I am not an idealist. I am a staunch illusionist, in fact. Idealism is, in my view, not a close second, but it is the only second. I would contend that an honest assessment of the possibility space of consciousness leaves us with only these two options.

The hard problem, which I would contend doesn't really exist, nonetheless presents as a reductio against the entire framework that generates it. Once you understand this, you're left with only two coherent exits. Everything else is, ultimately, a failure dressed up as philosophical babble.

Standard physicalism, by far the sanest option, holds that qualia are either identical to or fully realized by physical processes. The hard problem shows that this is not only undemonstrated from within the physicalist framework, but structurally impossible to demonstrate from within a physicalist framework. No existing account of information processing, neural correlates or functional integration can(and in my view, ever will) explain the felt experience of qualia itself. Explanatory gap arguments aren't just intuition pumps; the conceivability of zombies tracks a genuine modal point: Phenomenal properties are not entailed by any third-person physical description.

Thus, an honest physicalism is left with two choices. It can say the explanatory gap reflects an honest ontological gap, or it can embrace the Illusionist stance.

This is where the fork in the road presents itself.

1. Consciousness exists as it presents itself; it must be explained ontologically, physical properties can't do it. Consciousness is then either fundamental or grounded in something non-physical(panpsychism doesn't achieve this in my view), thus we are left with idealism or something close.

2. (the saner approach)Consciousness doesn't exist as presented. This is not to say consciousness doesn't exist, but that the manner in which it presents to us is itself illusory. There is no hard problem.

These are the only two views that hold, in my eyes. Everything else fails.

Dualism has never overcome the interaction problem. Type-B physicalisms require brute necessitation between physical and phenomenal facts, with no explanation of why they're necessitated. This is just dualism with added embarassment. Panpsychism sounds, at first, like a stable third option until you realize that simply saying consciousness is fundamental and distributed through nature runs into the combination problem. Panpsychism without idealism is just the hard problem with the explanatory burden redistributed rather than discharged. Higher order theories(IIT, Global Workspace) are all attempts to give physical and or functional analyses of consciousness that either covertly redefine consciousness in functional terms, or assert that a certain physical organization is identical to experience. All this does is assert physicalism without explaining why identity holds.

The best move, building on Frankish and Dennett, takes the bullet: Phenomenal consciousness as ordinarily conceived doesn't exist. There is no "what-it-is-like-ness". There are only functional states that represent themselves as having phenomenal properties. The hard problem quickly dissolves because the thing in question, qualia, is a kind of introspective confabulation. This is not nearly as radical as many claim it to be in light of the aforementioned facts about third-person access to said qualia. Honest physicalists(myself, especially) are willing to bite this bullet. If not, then I fear we are left with only the following option.

If we cannot swallow that qualia are a kind of cognitive confabulation, then we must be committed to the view that experience is, at least in some way, ontologically basic. The physical world must then be constituted, in some way, by experience or is itself a kind of representation within an experiential or mental medium. There are many flavors of this, Kastrup, Berkeley, Husserl; they differ in details. But their commitments remain the same.

Many will resist this fork for obvious reasons, both exits being truly vertiginous. Illusionism, while nowhere near as fringe as idealism, requires us to deny the most immediate datum of our first-person existence. Idealism requires that we accept the entire framework of modern science, heavily predicated on physicalism, is at best a useful model of something that is ultimately experiential in nature. But this discomfort doesn't entail that there are saner, third options on the table. I would contend that there are, in fact, none.

We have only two choices: we take the hard problem all the way, or we don't take it seriously at all. I would contend it doesn't exist, but if you're going to bite the bullet and remain a physicalist, then I don't think you've truly considered physicalism all the way through.