This may be a commonplace in statistical science, but it came as a pleasant surprise to me to see "It is surprising" operationally defined in this paper, namely as reaching a level of dashed expectation by philosophers who took the metasurvey. "It is surprising" is one of countless expressions that, in my view, are used to subtly and illicitly but powerfully and even unawares used to bring others around to seeing things the way oneself does. I described an example in this passage: 

The point I want to make in the present chapter is that the natural tendency to objectify what is essentially subjective is pervasive in our experience, even beyond morality. Consider the seemingly innocuous sentence, “The results were surprising,” which I quote from a book about the physiology and psychology of marine animals. The context is the discussion of an experiment to determine whether crustaceans can feel pain. The subjects were hermit crabs living inside abandoned snail shells that had been outfitt ... (read more)

COUNTING THE WRONG CONSCIOUSNESS OUT

Commentary on Dan Dennett on:

 "On a Phenomenal Confusion about Access and Consciousness"

Dan Dennett: "Many researchers on consciousness have adopted Ned Block's purported distinction between "access" consciousness and 'phenomenal' consciousness (Block, 1995, 2005, 2007), but in spite of its evident appeal, it is not a defensible distinction. Earlier critiques (Dennett, 1994, 1995, Cohen and Dennett, 2012) have not deterred those who favor the distinction, but perhaps one more exposition of the problems will break through"

Yes, there was a phenomenal confusion in doubling our mind-body-problems by doubling our consciousnesses.

No, organisms don't have both an "access consciousness" and a "phenomenal consciousness."

Organisms' brains (like robots' brains) have access to information (data). 

Access to data can be unconscious (in organisms and robots) or conscious (in organisms, sometimes, but probably not at all in robots, so far).

And organisms feel. Feeling c ... (read more)

Is this an answer to Chalmers’s fading qualia thought experiment?  (2110, The Character of Consciousness, Oxford University Press p. 25 ff).
He puts forward a principle of organizational invariance: “This principle states that any two systems with the same fine-grained functional organization will have qualitatively identical experiences. If the causal patterns of neural organization were duplicated in silicon, for example, with a silicon chip for every neuron and the same patterns of interaction, then the same experiences would arise. According to this principle, what matters for the emergence of experience is not the specific physical makeup of a system but the abstract pattern of causal interaction between its components.” He supports this principle by the use of thought experiments about “fading”  qualias. The analysis, claiming to show that the contrary position would be absurd, is based on the fact that the creature whose causal patterns in its cognitive system are identical t ... (read more)

ABSTRACT: This paper analyzes David Chalmers’s “Hard Problem” and his argument against natural selection in the formation of human consciousness. It explores specific weaknesses in Chalmers’s reasoning and evidence from his published articles over the years.  Keywords: consciousness, psychology, mind, evolution, natural selection, duality.

            The problem with most forms of representationalism is that they do not actually close the explanatory gap. “Tracking representationalism” does not seem to be an exception. Beside the various possible objections explored in the paper, there remains the further objection that tracking representationalism, like its cousins, simply does not do what it aims to. It does not explain phenomenal consciousness, or why there is anything it is like to be in a mental state. The reason for this is that “what it is like” is a first-person experience, whereas talk of mental states, intentionality, tracking, etc., are third-person descriptions of events in the world, not of the phenomenal experience to which they correspond. What is missing is some strategy that can bridge the gap from third to first-person accounts—some way to “walk in the shoes of the brain”. To explain ... (read more)

Kant states that "hospitality means the right of a stranger not to be treated with hostility when he arrives on someone else's territory"(PP).However, at the beginning of the part on the Three Definitive Principles of a Perpetual Peace, Kant argues that any one who is not under a civil constitution can be treated as a stranger, because his/her unlawful status is a "permanent threat" to me (PP). These two claims seem to contradict each other.

According to me there are two possibilities:

1) The right of a stranger only applies to strangers who are under a civil constitution, i.e. citizens of a state. This, however, already qualifies the stranger, and the stranger ceases to be a total stranger. In the treatment of the third article, Kant however does q ... (read more)