As I see it, you can either work from the bottom, to tell a biological story about why critters possess the capacities they do for registering, responding, and balancing needs against on another, and you can see consciousness as playing an important role in that process 1/2
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Do you think there's anything I know about the essence of a feeling when I attend to how it feels? Does Mary learn something about the essence of red experiences when she learns what it's like have one? I think a partial grasp of essence is enough to get the argument going.
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If you put the questions this way, then I would have to say no. I'm very doubtful about the concept of "essence" here. Also, I think the Mary case is just a weak intuition pump that shows nothing decisive.
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Good way to state the problem with the far too easily assumed transparency of our own conscious experience. True for other aspects of mental life. It’s precisely this complacence that has been illuminatingly challenged by good experimental design in psych & cog neuro
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The nuanced transparency thesis I defend is compatible with getting our experience wrong in all sorts of ways. I said *in so far as* we know what it's like to be in a given conscious state, we know the essence of that conscious state.
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