Jef Allbright wrote:
...
> The statement "I am conscious", as usually intended to mean that one can
> be absolutely certain of one's subjective experience, is not an
> exception, because it's not even coherent. It has no objective context
> at all. It mistakenly assumes the existence of an observer somehow in
> the privileged position of being able to observe itself. Further,
> there's a great deal of empirical evidence showing that the subjective
> experience that people report is full of distortions, gaps,
> fabrications, and confabulations.
> If instead you mean that you know you are conscious in the same sense
> that you know other people are conscious, then that is not an exception,
> but just a reasonable inference, meaningful within quite a large context.
> If Descartes had said, rather than "Je pense, donc je suis", something
> like "I think, therefore *something* exists", then I would agree with
> him.
Bertrand Russell wrote that Descartes should only have said, "There's thinking." "I" is an inference. :-)
Brent Meeker
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Received on Wed Dec 27 2006 - 14:24:15 PST