Most of the time when people say they have an unpopular opinion, it turns out it’s actually pretty popular.
Do you have some that’s really unpopular and most likely will get you downvoted?
Most of the time when people say they have an unpopular opinion, it turns out it’s actually pretty popular.
Do you have some that’s really unpopular and most likely will get you downvoted?
Consciousness isn’t real. You aren’t actually having experiences even though your brain is telling you that you are.
If there is no “real” to be had then how can your brain manufacture an imitation of the “real” in the first place?
I feel like it’s best to ease people into illusionism rather than hit them with a statement like “consciousness isn’t real”, which they will almost certainly misunderstand and reject if they aren’t versed in the philosophy of mind (hence why it works well for this thread). As a teaser, I like the statement, “You are conscious, but not in the way you think you are”, i.e. their consciousness is not phenomenal in character. What that means exactly is a lengthy discussion, but it gives an opportunity to emphasize the aspects of consciousness that actually matter and to potentially offset things like moral status over to them. For most people, morality hinges on phenomenality, so you have to replace it with something before they can accept illusionism (in my opinion).
There is the morality angle, the feeling that one must be dismissing the moral relevance of suffering if suffering is not actually experienced, but the far more common objection is about foundational truth. For that reason I think beating around the bush will probably lead to misunderstanding; if consciousness is accepted in any sense, then surely part of what is accepted is that knowledge of direct experience supercedes all other beliefs in terms of truthfulness and cannot be denied? Surely it is still from this that all other beliefs inherit their truthfulness? But no, I am rejecting this hierarchy, it’s a tautology based on a false intuition. Even though I laid it out plainly, there are multiple responses here that seem to assume that I must not have even meant quite what I said.
What’s the difference?
For one, if we ever invent teleportation, everyone can stop worrying about whether they will actually come out on the other side in terms of continuity of experience. If there is no such thing to begin with, it is an irrational concern. Death as any kind of endless void can be acknowledged as a false abstraction and disregarded. We can stop looking for magical quantum tunnels in the brain etc. to explain “hard problems of consciousness” because all those paradoxes are resolved by accepting that consciousness isn’t real. We can stop worrying about when/how/whether AI might become conscious and stop trying to inflict our curse on it.
You just described having experiences that aren’t created by the outside world, but are instead created by your brain (an object in the outside world). But you’re still having experiences.
So birds aren’t real?
Birds are more real than you