Especially, it seems to me that on such an account normative claims can’t have any meaning beyond pragmatic efficacy, since even truth has no meaning beyond pragmatic efficacy either. Happiness is right out as an ethical criterion, since that’s a factor of consciousness – it strains belief to think that one should act in such a way as to merely produce different chemical states and facial expressions. Similarly any sort of Kantian duty or obligation, which depends on the autonomy of the will.

And when all you have left is pure pragmatism, it seems like the only thing bad you can say about Hitler is that he lost the war – for in that respect his information was poorly processed for prediction and control. People who commit successful genocides have real access to truth, because they took in information in a way that allowed them to act on the basis of correct predictions. And such pragmatic truth, successful prediction and control, seems like the only standard on which goodness can be assessed – if there can be any such standard at all.

Michael:
That claim in your first 2 sentences is precisely what the materialists are arguing against.

What I wrote was (a)Unless you’re sleep writing you are conscious.
The contrary of that is (1) you can be asleep and be conscious or (2) write intelligible sentences whilst asleep (3) awake or asleep there is no such thing as being conscious within the meaning that they are opposed to.

My second sentence was (b)Consciousness is not something running parallel to the writing, the walking, the coiling of a rope, whistling a happy tune, it’s there in the activity itself.

Now if the materialists are against that then they are for consciousness running parallel. No hardly that. It is just this that they are opposed to and which the main thrust of their argument is against. This is the dreaded dualism which Patricia Churchland deplores.

Vendler 1994, Swinburne 1994, McGinn 1989, Nagel 1994, Warner 1994). One line of reasoning assumes that consciousness is the manifestation of a distinctly nonphysical thing, and hence has no physical properties that might be explored by techniques suitable to physical things.

Dualism, as this view is known, is still to be found among those within the tradition of Kant and Hegel, as well as among some with religious convictions.

(From her paper WHAT SHOULD WE EXPECT FROM A THEORY OF CONSCIOUSNESS?

My latter point was that if you see the problem field in terms of matter/mind and strike out mind you are still involved in a reduction. You have allowed the Cartesian view to set your agenda. There are many other views which transcend that simplistic division.

According to this materialist argument, consciousness is an “illusion” in that it gives a misleading account of the causes of our actions. It gives that account to our network-systems, and if our network-systems integrate that information as if it were true, those networks will perform worse (understand/predict the world less well) than if they integrated information about statistical neural networks.

As such, there is absolutely still meaning in words, in materialistworld. One might say that there is *information* in words instead, but that’s getting semantic: either way, even if consciousness is an inactive epiphenomenon, words still have factual (and manipulative) value, and claims still have a productive and meaningful relationship to the thing being described. An illusion contains bad information, a lie contains bad information because another network entity ‘intended’ to manipulate the listener.

Michael:
That claim in your first 2 sentences is precisely what the materialists are arguing against.

I do clearly need to read more of the likes of Dennett and the Churchlands, as I imagine at least some of these questions are answered. I will be very surprised if they answer the relevant questions well enough to be actually plausible.