>>14329499As someone who used to be a strict materialist, I became much more lenient when I was faced with the dilemma of either denying my own consciousness, or fall into some sort of solipsism.
Even my current compatibilist stance is a cope, for not only do I rely on an unspecified mechanism that would make, but it still fails to explain my conscious experience. Sure, the material cause of it is my brain, which is why I'm comfortable with postulating such a mechanism, but the existence of said mechanism does not explain why, for example, I consciously experience myself and not yourself, and viceversa (unless you are a p-zombie, which I do believe exist in some form).
Materially, I should deny my own consciousness, but I cannot (cogito ergo sum).
Empirically, I should deny the consciousness of other people (a sort of solipsism of consciousness), but it is a slippery slope down to actual solipsism ("Why me?", "What's so special about me?", "What happens when I die?", "What happened before I was born?", "Perhaps the world is a figment of my immagination", "Since I am the only consciousness in the world, it is most parsimonious to assume that the world is all in mind") which is obvious degeneration of thought.
It would be interesting if the thesis in "The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind" had some kernel of truth to it, as lesser states of conscious experience would help understand the link between the material and the mental, but I don't think it would help us understand how it emerges anyway, unless we managed to create from scratch something that is undistinguishably conscious, which is a total pipe-dream to me.
So I am forced to be compatibilist and cautiously dualist.
TL;DR: hard problem of consciousness.
