![]() What makes this error perspectival (or IFR) is the way it turns on the combination of cognitive capacity and information available. So when our ancestors looked into the heavens and began charting the movement of celestial bodies, the possibility that they were also moving seemed, well, preposterous. As a result we stand still when the world stands still relative to us. Short of this and vestibular effects, a sense of motionless is the cognitive default. We perceive ourselves moving whenever a large portion of our visual field moves–when we experience ‘vection,’ as psychologists call it. What is an ‘informatic frame-of-reference’ error? Consider the most famous one of all: geocentrism. Radically mistaken about everything, in fact. It argues that philosophy of mind needs to keep its dire informatic straits clear: once you understand that we make similar informatic frame-of-reference (IFR) errors regarding consciousness as we are prone to make in the world, you acknowledge that we might be radically mistaken about what consciousness is. Its primary insight turns on the role lack plays in structuring conscious experience. From the standpoint of BBT, what we call the Hard Problem conflates two quite distinct difficulties: 1) the ‘generation problem,’ the question of how a certain conspiracy of meat can conjure whatever consciousness is and 2) the ‘explanandum problem,’ the question of what any answer to the first problem needs to explain to count as an adequate explanation. It advances the hypothesis that the various perplexities that bedevil our attempts to explain consciousness are largely artifacts of these informatic constraints. It proceeds on the noncontroversial presumption that consciousness is the product of some subsystem of the brain, and that, as such, it operates within a variety of informatic constraints. The aim of the Blind Brain Theory (BBT) is to rough out the ‘logic of neglect’ that underwrites ‘error consciousness,’ the consciousness we think we have. ![]() What effect do constraints on informatic availability and cognitive capacity have on our ability to make sense of consciousness? This is one of those questions that philosophers literally dream of stumbling on, questions so obvious, so momentous in implication, that their answers have the effect of transforming orthodox understanding–if you’re lucky enough to catch the orthodoxy’s ear, that is! All the new can do is keep whispering, hoping against hope that something might be heard between the booming repetitions. Aphorism of the Day I: Consciousness is a little animal in our heads, curled up and snoozing, at times peering into the neural murk, otherwise dreaming what we call waking life.Īphorism of the Day II: People are almost entirely incapable of distinguishing the quality of what is said from the number and status of the ears listening.
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