Colin McGinn — Mysterianism, Consciousness, Free Will, and G

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This is Colin McGinn with Michael Shermer and my first time hearing Colin.

I thought this was interesting because it seems like a powerful way of pushing philosophy forward - ie. interrogate what you don't know, interrogate what you're not sure you know even harder, and interrogate things that have trite historical answers even harder still.

I thought the question of color he was asking was particularly interesting although I thought I caught a discrepancy in the way he was thinking about it, that is as far as I understand we don't project color onto the world, it's a measurement in a model that we have in our nervous systems, in that sense we never actually 'see' the world or project anything onto it, we only ever see what our eyes process (or in stranger cases we may gain additional information from other parts of our brains through synaesthesia).

Still, very interesting discussion on a lot of topics and I really appreciate the hard-nosed approach. For a while I thought a lot of mysterianism was just a cop-out but he's making me rethink that.

Also I'd be curious on what you guys think of his take on compatibalism. Even hearing him explain it about as well as he can I still can't get away from interpreting his, and Dennett's, as a consequentialist reaction. True, there's being able to exercise your agency unmolested by external coercion or with internal ease but I really have a tough time considering that anything more than a way to salvage moral philosophy from the bathwater - important for law and sociology no doubt but the word free will still has too much of an 'I could have done otherwise' ring to it for me to want to say that there's freedom.