jrlocke

Because there is no evidence to the contrary?

I'll save reasonable people some time by highlighting the key premise: "what if materialism is not the only game in town?"

I think, broadly, it's that a theory of mind should be informed by empirical evidence, by scientific research, and that liberal doses of the those will dissolve away many of the classic problems in philosophy of mind.

I totally get the sentiment, but I really want to read 3 NYT articles a month.

To make the company what I pay now for a subscription, that would come out to around $6.00 an article. I'm not sure I'd press that $6.00 to read button very often.

Your scheme would broaden the total number of readers, but I'm unsure that the company would actually do well under it.

To be more explicit, I'm saying I find it weird to hear so much about the Chinese room argument from a crowd of (presumably) materialists.

The Chinese room argument itself isn't very compelling. Surely the constituent parts of the brain are fundamentally governed solely by physics, surely thought arises solely from the physical brain, and surely the constituent parts (and thus thought) could be described by a sufficiently complex discreet computation.

Are we not conscious?

You're looking for rout, not route :)

Why not some animals have fictional mental states and others do not?

> I’ve seen Denver the guilty dog. She’s behaving like she feels guilty [therefore she likely experiences guilt].

I'm not sure I believe this, but there are other believable explanations than yours: consider that humans and the dog could share a non-mental dispositional state (something more basic and hardwired into us) that leads to guilty actions. You would acknowledge that some very simple animals function in this way, and we as humans retain other core systems from simpler times.

Human consciousness could be on top of this and not a guaranteed consequence of it. We additionally rationalize and experience this state and the actions we tend to take from the guilty dispositional state–and as humans call that guilt–but the dispositional state could exist on its own.

This is an unpopular opinion, and should be wielded very carefully, but I think something often lost in these conversations is that the existence of a human behavior in an animal is not sufficient evidence that it's backed by the full weight of the human-like mental states. It may well be, but additional evidence must be presented.

As humans, we're strongly prone to anthropomorphize–I'm capable of ascribing human feelings even to inanimate objects–and so are prone to doing the above without rigor.

An extreme example: if you drop acid into the water in which a paramecium lives, it will fire up its cilia and frantically try to retreat. It's a single cell, there is no suffering or mental states, but it sure looks like it.

An ant could have a sad looking death, but it surely cannot reach the depths of human sorrow, and the related suffering, that a similar event could elicit. It can't mourn the time it won't spend with its children, or the ways its life could have gone.

I'm not proposing that everything between us and the paramecium cannot suffer, but that arguments in these areas must go beyond X has behavior Y, so X must have full mental state associated with Y.