Here is an analogy to part of the problem.

Imagine I said to someone "I look just Like my brother" and the person wanted to know what "Like" meant. I could then point towards two sheep and explain how sheep A looked like sheep B.

I wouldn't need to say "Imagine a planet near Earth but without helium in it and then imagine a human like creature with two brains who couldn't speak....."

At what stage do you need to invoke these wild things. You would think they would be a last resort

I think an argument ad absurdum is a different matter. You might say "Utilitarianism leads to the conclusion that we should destroy all life" because this intends to show the extreme consequences of a position at its extreme not to argue that such a scenaio is possible.

no matter how implausible. Plausibility is a red herring. — SophistiCat

I disagree.

I said something similar in my counterfactuals thread. The more implausible a scenario gets the further it is removed from reality and the original premises. It is one thing for all the molecules in a gas to go into the corner of a container but what Davidson proposes goes way beyond that because matter would have to get itself into states of improbability that are supposed to have taken a whole life time and billions of years to reach.

And there is also the impossibility of a mental state being reformed that was derived from personal experience. For example say my boss at work calls me an idiot and that creates a nuanced mental state in me, then that mental state is inextricably linked to that event and can't be identically copied just by recreating a brain state. It is not the equivalent of making a square template and copying it to create an almost identical square, because experiences are not identical to each other or don't have this simplistic "copyability" structure.

In the end it just seems unclear what this thought experiment is saying. LikeThe Twin earth experiment I think it fails to defend the identity-identical claim.

Things are only superficially identical even things that appear identical are in a different space and their atoms are unlikely to be identical. Identical twins can easily be told apart straight away by a dog using scent so there can be very easy routes to proving things that appear identical aren't. For something to be truly identical they would have to be atom by atom identical and in the same space and time.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swampman

"Suppose Davidson goes hiking in the swamp and is struck and killed by a lightning bolt. At the same time, nearby in the swamp another lightning bolt spontaneously rearranges a bunch of molecules such that, entirely by coincidence, they take on exactly the same form that Davidson's body had at the moment of his untimely death."

What about entropy and the second law of thermodynamics?.....I mean come on

I have my own thought experiment that is akin to Searles Chinese room idea but with no extravagant elements.

I ask people to imagine a box with a triangular and circular holes cut in the bottom. (Easy to make at home with a cardboard box) then you put round and triangular objects in the box, shake it and it sorts them into two piles of similar objects.
This is to show how a structure can look like it is performing an intelligent process (categorising for example) when it is clearly it has no cognitive states. A computer is just a far more elaborate version of this but with no need to invoke mental type states.

Now what would it benefit, to place this thought experiment in the Year 3000 and invoke aliens with two brains who have mastered time travel.

(Parfitt is one of the worse for these kind of excrutiatingly elaborate fantasies.)

I don't agree that the new skills type argument resolves the issue at all, personally. I don't think the physics theory of colour (wave length etc) and knowledge of the visual system amount to knowledge about colour experiences.

I think the argument is problematic because it seems to rely on the idea that scientific theories usurp experience. But scientific descriptions are only models of what might be behind experince. He makes the same mistake as Putnam in exagerating the scope of language.

I think the argument succeeds however in showing that there are features of experience that cannot be modelled. It undermines reductionism.

It puzzles me how little importance people place on consciousness when it is our only access to reality.

People's position on these thought experiments seems to be ideological in that they are prone to dislike a thought experiment that is opposing their position.

What concerns me though is why extravagant thought experiments get so much mileage. Swampman is another ludicrous one. I don't know any other field that would except these type of thought experiments.

I don't see how mental states in two different people can be identical because they are in different minds, bodies and in different places. The point of the thought experiment is that XYZ is not H20 Therefore if you think brain states are mental states then because the brain contains H20 they can never be in identical brain states.

The premise of the thought experiment misrepresents language anyway. When people refer to water they are never referring to H20, as was pointed out most water contains much more than H20 so the referent of water is more vague and can refer to impure water in seas, lakes, streams and cups etc. There is no reason for language ever to refer directly and infallibly to essences.
The theory of H20 can be usurped so in which case language would never refer to anything (see changing models of atoms). I think language only refers to mental states, such as the appearance in consciousness of water, and not essences.

The Mary's room argument is plausible because nothing in it is impossible even if the conclusions or implications of the thought experiment are considered invalid. And people are born achromatic so there has always been the possibility of asking them about colour concepts. It was just convenient that Nordby existed and was an expert in the field so that he could prove that all current knowledge of colour science and perception did not get him close to knowing what red is like.

It is suspicious if in order to support a position you have to create a wild thought experiment invoking nothing that is immediately possible. Why can't a thought experiment for "externalism" just use our planet and our senses? The Prinz tentacles one is even more wild and confusing and I think invoking physics is pretenious because even phycists are uncertain about how to interpret phenomena so it is unlikely a philosopher without a physics background could invoke physics ideas validly.

Also, since we don't know what conscious states are assuming they are brain states that are identical to biochemical configurations is begging the question.

I don't see how God can be considered to care about life and children considering he lets children live in poverty, warzones and starve to death every day.
He allows children to grow up in abusive homes and be bullied, die of cancer etc.

Aborting a child before evidence of sentience is probably more humane than inflicting this on it.

I think there is a difference between individual actions and policies that devalue life and creating a weapon which you know will obliterate thousands of lives.

In someways you might feel safe if you live in a decent country with a nuclear deterence. But it means you accept that one day your government might have to kill lots of other people in another country.

The idea that we might need to use the weapons in the future is a further disturbing thought.

The person I was arguing with was trying to defend science and technology from criticism by claiming there was a need to develop the weapons. The topic was Artifical intelligence and I was arguing that we need to closely explore unintended consequences before creating technology and not just have an unchecked free for all of science and innovation. Because the humans who develop these theroies and innovations are part of a psychologically troubled species.

What is "a lot of aid"? — Bitter Crank

They could deliver no aid at all. How much aid do you want them to deliver? It is actual probably fairer trading with these countries that would help them more. But with some countries like North korea, the Aid process is hampered by uncooperative governments and a lack of transparency.

Countries like Iran and Russia Don't need aid but we need to avert conflict with them and deflate Iran's nuclear aspirations. Considering Germany and Japan have had the largest military actions taken against them I don't think gloabal inequality and poverty have much to do with nuclear weapon problems.

It might be psychologically possible to launch a nuclear missile because of the distance between the button pusher and the victims. Also most of the death might be instantaneous. But then the person who has delivered the missiles has become a mass killer. I suppose it is better to let yourself be killed than do that. But then again if the enemy is going to kill millions of innocent people themselves as someone said,then mass death would happen one way or another.

It is all a bit surreal for me.

I don't know if my City in England is a target.

I was recently, briefly discussing why nuclear weapons were created in the first place.

Someone said Jewish scientists helped create them because of their fear of the anihilation of theJews. But I pointed out that they were actually used on the Japanese and not the Germans.

It has opened a Pandora's box. Now everyone poses an existential threat to everyone else.

I suppose the problems that led up to Nuclear armaments were constant historical hostilities, genocides and arms races. Maybe Nuclear weapons are the biggest manifestation of something hidden but destructive in the human psyche? To step away from the brink of mutual destruction would probably require global psychotherapy and peace initiatives.

The West provides a lot of aid to poor countries. North Korea recieves a lot of Aid. But the Aid can be exploited and misdirected. Aid Agencies left North Korea because their efforts were being frustrated. There are confounding factors in giving Aid including the politics of the countries being targetted.

In World War Two the axis powers were being so destructive and aggressive that we fought fire with fire. It is a mistake to think the world is a benign place and if we all just held hands and got along..

I am a strong antinatalist and I don't think you can manufature a Utopia. But the capability for destruction now is unprecendented giving us more existential moral dilemmas than previously faced. I am not personally frightened of nuclear war happening, but I do suffer from existential anxiety in general. The world is more complex and confusing place with larger dilemmas.

Communist regimes have killed millions upon millions of people without outside intervention, from Stalin's purges and deliberate famines, to Mao's similar activities killing an estimated 50 million or people more and with Pol Pot's Cambodian genocide and so on. We are just lucky not to have been born one of these people. Millions of people dying slowly in a famine is a worse death than an instant death in a nuclear strike.

Is non intervention in other peoples misery and death a good thing? Are we simply not intervening out of self preservation rather than pacifiism.

It is just a dangerous planet.

Killing in self defence seems less deliberate than a pre-emptive strike. You are not seeking primarily to kill but to defend yourself. However the collateral damage would be massively disproportionate.

I suppose that is the big issue with nuclear weapons. The (ethically) disproportionate collateral damage.

We will all die eventually so in a sense premature death is not vastly different from our eventual death. If you create people they are on a path to eventaul death. So to what extent can we value life? Does valuing life meaning keeping everyone alive for as long as humanly possible?

It seems with countries like North Korea, the masses don't have the power to unseat a rogue government but maybe they should do everything within their power to topple the government to prevent a foreign attack. There is an element of apathy in the face of what seems like overwhelming forces. War might emerge from a kind of apathy in some cases. But then again with the world wars there were people eagerly embracing war (Freudian death drive?)

There are billions of human beings alive. How many of them are having similar experiences? What is so radically different about your child's experience that makes creating them necessary? What value you can there be in numerous people having much the same experiences?

I don't know what kind of assertion is being made when people have children. I would have to have a massive incentive to want to create a child and that kind of incentive would have to be that either they would have an excellent quality of life or that they had something very unique to offer.

I feel that mindless unreflective reproduction is a massive source of irrationality and I am trying to understand peoples motives. I can think of numerous reasons not to have a child and no compelling reason to have a child.

I think that if we did discover a perfect planet with near identical humans on it, with better longer lives people would have no reason to have a child, because other human like creatures were being created. If there were a billion of these perfect yhumans what would be so special about creating another sentience with a poorer quality life?

Like I mentioned with my Bach/Handel analogy, if someone has already written amazing music then what is the point of creating mediocre music?

I think the presence of better things shows what a lot of people don't have and that better things exists means we should not accept a poorer quality of life.

I can imagine the act of heterosexual sex but not the lust and intense desire motivating it. I don't think imagining someone having sex or feeling lust is the same as the vivid mental states one is in with lust and desire.

In the case of a minority sexuality it is not a big problem but when it is the main desire motivating society it does feel a bit alienating.

It might be like hating football and sitting through a football match surrounded by screaming fans.

The issue though is of whether we can have a theory of these mental states that we share or that are very unique and tied up with other complex mental states?

There is always the possibility of characterising these states wrongly and over generalising. I don't foresee a situation when we can apply one model for the mind that accounts for everyone and is lawful. I find a lot of the literature problematic when it is trying to do this.

Yhumans are only humans, with a better quality of life. They are a distinct possibility and there are yhumans in this sense here. You are resisting the possibility there could be a better world for humans and hence making sure that we tolerate this substandard one.

There is no excuse for creating humans who have poor quality of life. And I think that it is rather grotesque that people seem to think that they should be created in some kind of utilitarian calculation because some people find life fulfilling.

It is irrelevant whether you.think other people have reached their full potential because they clearly have not. For example if you are only using ten percent of your computers memory you clearly have the potential to store a lot more information and do a lot more with the computer regardless of how much enjoyment you get out of using the computer at 10 percent its capacity. If you think happiness is all that matters that leads to the absurd conclusion that people could live in hell as long as they are happy.

Saying someone has not reached there full potential is not the same as saying they are unhappy or unfulfilled.

How do you know yhumans don't exist? The universe is immensely vast. You seem to be fatalistic about this being the only possible configuration of life.

I am not saying people didn't lead full lives before the internet but they didn't live up to their full potential.

Imagine someone died from smallpox before the vaccine was invented. Did they live up to their full potential? Clearly not. The rise of the internet, air travel, telephones, vaccines among other things illustrates that people in the past were not experiencing all there was to experience and there is a lot of evidence that they simply did have poorer quality lives that they would acknowledge themselves.

My parents certainly view their current lifestyle as easier and better in some respects for instance now my mother has a washing machine and dryer and doesn't need to use the mangle. My dad has now travelled around the world to several countries.

If someone offers you either 1 million dollars or 2 Million dollars would you turn down the latter because the first was sufficient?

I don't think having an okay standard of life makes having a much better quality of life less desirable.

The reason people believe we can do better is because we actually can. We can do a lot better and are very far from utopia, people still starve to death every day and hundreds of thousands of people commit suicide every year.

But I think people are subconsciously influenced by unspoken arguments that this is the best we can do and this is all we have. I don't understand peoples tolerance of inequality and low standards. It seems immensely selfish to tolerate these because you personally are happy.

I think the only way you could possibly justify creating a child is if you were definitely giving them a good quality of life. But inequality proves people aren't.

Most of you seem to be advocating the premise that new facts should not alter your decisions.

There is strong evidence that people are influenced by the just world fallacy.

When I was a child I thought the world was better than it actually is and was unaware of the extent of exploitation and inequality and poverty etc. The more you find it about these things the more it can influence your values and decision making.

But because of the fundamental attribution error and just world hypothesis and similar things people tolerate gross inequality and so on.

The point I made is that the people on the other planet live for much, much longer and have much better lives in a way that is not obtainable here.

If an argument for having children is that you are creating more quality lives then in my scenario you are not creating more quality lives because there are far better lives somewhere else. So again what is the point of creating lives on here when in this scenario there are yhumans who are having much better and longer experiences. You can't claim you are adding to some over all happiness or that you are providing someone with something invaluable.

The unborn don't have any desires so in my scenario you know that your child will be born with a relatively poor quality life to what is possible and not living up to her potential.

People were happy before the internet but does that mean those pre-internet people would not have wanted to use the internet? They were happy with less because that is all they knew not because they were living up to their full potential.

I didn't argue that. I asked how you could justify creating a poorer quality life. There are separate arguments easily made about why this world is bad place. (Genocide and famine etc) The question is why create poor quality lives in face of evidence of better quality lives?

I am definitely one hundred percent antinatalist and I think it is always wrong and unjustifiable to have children.

I want to understand why people would harm children when they didn't need to when they could have higher expectations for them.

So I think that in this thought experiment people would inflict suffering on a child not for the survival of the species and not because there was no other alternative.... I think the idea that having children is inevitable and that this is the best we can do is a force for pronatalism. How committed are people to their child's welfare?

Even if you don't want people to stop having children why wouldn't you expect them to have higher expectations for their children?

I would love to write music like Handel and Bach but they have already done it. Their genius has prevented me from trying to emulate this reasonably. They and others have set a high standard which means you can recognise when its not being met. So I am not going to churn out reams of sub standard music. So surely knowing that children can have a better quality of life should make us aspire only for this quality of life for them?

I am not saying that we shouldn't have children here because of the possibility of a perfect planet here. I am questioning parents commitments and motives. Why are we afraid to have high standards for parents? you need lessons and a licence for a car?

One area which is a puzzle to me is sexuality. I cannot imagine what it is like to be heterosexual. I appreciate women and can tell when a woman is attractive but I don't have sexual desire towards women and I assume heterosexual men experience strong lust to towards the female form.

And because life is heteronormative and based around the predominant sexuality I have felt alienated. Society has been puzzled by homosexuality so there has been far more research into it than heterosexual desire (which is taken for granted often).

I have always thought that homosexuality is easier to explain than heterosexuality. Because as a homosexual you are attracted to a body similar to yours with similar erogenous zones but as a straight man you will never know what exactly what it is like for a female to experience orgasm etc (they fake orgasm didn't you hear!) And evolutionarily it is convoluted because you have to create two sexes that have very different sex organs that are in separate bodies and need to remain compatible. and then you have to get the one gender attracted to then other gender in a different looking body.

I find it strange that people assume I should be attracted to women simply because I am conscious of being in a mans body yet if I woke up as a woman that sexuality would be considered aberrant. Why should the body you are in decide whom you are attracted to? It didn't for me. (God condemns people for simply desiring the wrong gender)

So I do not think me imagining a man and woman having vigorous sex is anywhere near the same as experiencing heterosexual lust.

I have always been strongly of the opinion that mental illness can and probably is largely caused by society and parents. But I don't think that makes mental illness less real. For example smoking can cause cancer but that doesn't make the cancer less real because it is caused by something external.

Why shouldn't abuse etc cause mental illness? (also chemical imbalance/dementia's)

I don't think I simply have social anxiety any more because I test highly for Asperger's and am awaiting a diagnosis. Asperger's is more that just social anxiety but it includes heightened sensitivity to stimuli, feeling overwhelmed, fixating on things uncontrollably, not enjoying socialising and so on. So knowing this means you need to put yourself in appropriate environments.

It was interesting and shocking to find out that 90% of a people with Asperger's that were interviewed reported chronic bullying at school and there was a good explanation given for this phenomena. So they say "Neurotypicals" are responsible for a lot of the problems people on the Autism spectrum face. Society now tries to accommodate disabled people with ramps and wide spaces in buildings and braille on medication boxes. So there its the argument for society exacerbating or creating disabilities and dysfunction. The problem is not being exposed to, or listening to, other peoples testimonies especially in order to preserve norms and support generalisations.

What I am trying to understand is how on e can be morally consistent.

I think morality is hard to justify for a variety of reasons including the lack of a basis for moral truth. But it seems we can't claim things are wrong that we do ourselves in the process of procreation.

So we can't value consent as much as we claim to because we know people can't consent to being born so we need a different morality that doesn't make this all incongruent. My suggestion is that parents are the primary responsibility for creating children in a decent situation (I have explored this in another thread in general discussion)

For example it seems bizarre to complain about problems with the world and then have children in these same situations when you could tackle the problems first.
It is almost like infantilizing parents. I could easily create a child in poverty and with inadequate emotional stability. The challenge is for me to get in a stable situation first before procreating such as having a mortgage and counselling etc.

I think mindless procreation benefits exploiters who need other people to prop up their lifestyle. The rich depending on the cheap or free labour of the poor. So I would even see me having a child as enabling and endorsing the system. (unless I constantly fought the system)

I am asking, would you have children on this planet, knowing that there are a form of humans with a much better lifestyle with no suffering. Would you need to create more humans when these other ones where doing everything we want a fulfilled human to do?

The reason I made the environment toxic to us is to prevent you from moving to the planet and having children there. But the perfect planet is supposed to challenge your acceptance of a poor quality life here.

Because currently people can claim "This is the only world and this is my only chance"

I'm sorry. If I hurt your feelings it was unintended. — unenlightened

You didn't hurt my feelings. I illustrated that comment because it shows how people can use a term without knowing what it refers to and hence mischaracterise it based on their own values etc.

Finding the term social anxiety was very helpful to me. Because before then I had an excessive fear of people and going out and would only go out at night. So the term did not perpetuate my condition because I was very dysfunctional before I went to the group then I went to the group and was able to socialise and make friends.

One thing that happens when you have this condition is that you feel like you are the only person like this and that it is a character flaw. In general I didn't know what was happening to me. I didn't know that severe anxiety was a disorder with even a biological substrate related to the hippocampus and amygdala.

So what happens is that you have a sense of dread, you blush when your around people and or shake but you have no idea what's going on. In the end I went on medication for depression and anxiety and that was what decreased my social anxiety initially.

There are reasons why I might be prone to social anxiety such as Asperger's, long term bullying, aggressive father etc so it is not magic to imagine why someone might have a turbulent mental life. Also I went to a small branch of the Plymouth Brethren church that was very isolationist and hell and damnation and judgemental. It would be remarkable if I came out unscathed.

How ever much detail I give you (like Temple Grandin's clever lengthy descriptions) can you really imagine what I experienced? Also I am British and gay and that is a different experience from being straight and American or something else.

We are bringing so much to our immediate experience.

But if in my scenario there is a perfect world somewhere else in the universe can we justify creating life here? It seems to me that there is no justification for creating unsatisfactory lives.

It seems like having children on this planet amounts to claiming that this is the best we can do. It seems to imply that this is the only planet with life on and there is no other planet in the infinite universe with a better quality of life.

In my specific scenario I was wondering if the existence of a perfect planet would deter people from procreating here but coming to think of it people procreate here in the face of gross inequality where there are billionaires with potentially incredible lifestyles.
But then we are told to be aspirational and aim towards that lifestyle. It feels to me like people are having children for self comfort (and sometimes sheer negligence) because they could improve the world and a child's lifestyle before creating a child.

The mean problem I see is that creating someone can lead to them experiencing great harm which can be avoided by not creating them.

So when you create someone you expose them to a risk of great harm that you can be held accountable for unless you were coerced into having a child.

A person cannot claim ignorance of harm a child may experience. So we have this paradoxical irony that it is seen as totally inappropriate to touch a stranger against there wishes. You are not supposed to rub a strangers arm on the bus yet you can expose your child to immense suffering (parents privilege) It is confusing me.

If I create a child I will very likely not be held accountable if they end up paralysed, schizophrenic, bullied and or depressed. Even though I know these things could happen to my child and I know what the worlds like.

You could argue that each parent must take full responsibility for their child and they cannot blame nature or other humans for that child's fate. There is that classic line "Won't somebody think of the children.." which is often used to enforce morality. Essentially morality is justified around the protection children but really in my opinion it is a way of parents passing the buck or just a sentimental ploy

I have no problem in forming images in my mind. For instance I am now imagining a large purple elephant with a banana in its trunk flying through the sky.

But that is not how My thoughts operate. I would find it hard to form a thought like " The German economy has taken a turn for the worse" in images.

All this kind of thing rests of a final theory of language and consciousness that we don't have.

My concern is about bad psychology abusing or neglecting the mentally ill. Especially with this idea that you can be an expert in someone else's mind and thus override what they are telling you (hetero-phenomenology)

If someone says to you "I am depressed" you don't know anything about it. I advocate a very detailed phenomenology. But that is not my experience of psychiatrists. If a psychiatrist fully comprehended what happened to me as a child they would recognise the depth of my problems. But only someone who has either had similar situations or a very sympathetic/empathetic person can fully appreciate the situation. People often minimise or misrepresent other peoples problems because they use weak words and weak analogies.

So if you seriously want to "know" someone else's mind you should be prepared to talk to them for hours in a very open minded but probing way.

When I mentioned social anxiety you said "I'm chronically shy and misanthropic; Have I got it?" That sounded derogatory and poor attempt to imagine social anxiety and this is what people with mental health are up against. IT is a mixture of prejudice and a failure of imagination.

Words for things that are not open for comparison fail to have content. — unenlightened

That is simply not true.

There is no reason why someone couldn't attach a word to a private sensation especially when it is very vivid to them. How did people like Einstein come up with new theories? They had to examine their own thoughts and reach new conclusions. I mentioned the transition from referring to some external event and adapting words to use on internal states. It is not all or nothing.

I think you are under some kind of illusion about the power of language to represent reality. Words have limited power to describe phenomena. If I am describing a dream I had I am not telling you everything about it just sketching an outline.

Anyway, the main point is that words alone can have no meaning unless they are associated with experiences in some way, and experiences can have no meaning unless they are grouped under concepts in some way — unenlightened

Yes but the problem is that some experiences are public (have an external referent) and some are private so that the words referring to our mental states are not open for comparison.

Temple Grandin does a good job of explaining how she thinks but I am not convinced that what someone tells us is all there is to the phenomenon of thought.

I am not arguing that we are completely cut off from other peoples mental states but that there is not going to be a point where we can compare them to validate our theories about them.

I can't tell you what words were on the flyer because I can't remember as it was over a decade ago.
Is your question how can words about subjective mental states get meaning?

The mental states just "are" before they are labelled. I think there is a transition process where someone sees some external references to a mental state and makes an analogy. So for example fear has a lot of external cues. Once you have language you can internalise it and create analogies. This doesn't give other people direct access to your mind though.

Social anxiety has a lot of external markers so it is not a difficult case, but things like thought, dreams and memory are different. Memory has been shown to include a wide range of phenomena so it is unlikely that the word can be used to a capture a unitary thing. In these cases there is a big possibility of very diverse private mental states that cannot be compared by analogy.

Temple Grandin has talked about thinking in Images and I know it is not how I think. She needs to imagine pictures to have concepts such as seeing different cars in her mind to capture the general concept "car" or seeing red in different images for that concept. That is just one incident of evidence of how people think very differently. I have no images in my thoughts usually just a constant stream of language in an internal dialogue just like how I am writing here.
I am writing in the manner I think.

I came across the word social anxiety on a poster in the central library. Below the words Social Anxiety Support Group was a description of the symptoms I shared. That way I was able to then apply the label to myself.

Now I am waiting to be tested for Asperger's Syndrome. The words pull together strands of experience into a recognisable entity.

The Churchland's scheme of replacing words like anger with Adrenalin etc is obviously misguided to me.

Changing the word you use to refer to a mental state doesn't change the mental state or get rid of it. They seemed to think that using scientific language is somehow avoiding mysterious mental state words but when people say they feel angry they are referring to the feeling and not making a claim at possible biochemical influences.

Words can be a short cut or pragmatic access to a topic. A true reduction to the natural sciences would be immensely complex if you wanted to claim we didn't need to invoke folk psychology.

I can't even see how you would reduce semantic statements of motivations like "I divorced my wife because she cheated." A crude reductionist might say you divorced your wife because certain neurons fired at time B but that would be speculative and not a true verifiable causal account.

So-called reason giving explanations are very effective, explanatory and don't need replacing. It is actually surprising how effective words are sparing us many headaches. But also this ease can be misleading. I do believe in the Power relations analysis that words are utilised like tools and weapons not in unbiased, transparent way.

When I was unconscious under general anesthetic I had no experiences and there was nothing it was like.There was no way I could know anything in that state. We can posit a wide range of subconscious and unconscious things but we have to be conscious to reflect on them.

So I am invoking a state of non consciousness. How could we know anything and yet be non-conscious or non existent? It is not a case of being skeptical about reality or the external world. I am just talking about access here. How we only know anything through consciousness initially before theorising starts.

People talk about brain imaging to read mental states but that requires the consciousness and subjectivity of the scientist. Psychoanalysis and theory about mental processing require a conscious theorist..

Most theories of perception accept that there is an external reality but claim with evidence that it must be represented to us in the brain. So on this picture What we are perceiving is a construct. I don't know how naive realism could explain the idea we could have direct unmediated access to an objective reality. In this sense reality might be hidden from us. At the same time I do feel I have immediate access to reality.

So I think we need to work out what consciousness does in relation to reality.

I think they dreamt in words.. and.. how can a blind person dream in images.

I think consciousness and characterising the mind is of utmost importance and relevant to everything including physics I don't think it can be reduced or subsumed to another paradigm or ignored. Because consciousness is our only access to reality. That has led to skepticism about reality a la Descartes

It would be puzzling if reality could be explained without an explanation of consciousness. That would be a reality explained but the realities observer remaining unexplained (as if outside reality).

So many issues arise from subjectivity and one I have begun to ponder is whether energy is a subjective notion. It strikes me that we describe something as energy when it is useful to us. The problem for us is not a shortage of energy but a shortage of useful energy,, grass is energy to a herbivore. The same could be said for the perception of entropy. So I don't see physics or at least physics concepts as independent of us creating this relentless mechanical reality.

So I think we need to incorporate the mental into our data and perspective and not go down the eliminatavist or reductionist routes which I believe are dishonest time wasting or delusion.

For example if didn't have minds would the internet exist? I think human inventions cause a great and swift reduction of entropy by putting matter in implausible functional states which arose because of will and desire etc.

The problem I am getting at is not whether words can capture mental states but the degree to which we can know other peoples mental states. It is also not about what might exist in the external world.

If someone talks about a car you can see a car but if they talk about their mind you can never see it. How can disputes about the nature of thought and memory etc ever be resolved?

Someone told me that they didn't dream in images where as I dream in glorious technicolor so I was surprised. I couldn't have a safe theory of dreams without knowing this. I dream like everyday life the only difference being few sounds and textures and I flip between locations instantaneously. If Myself and X dream differently with little in common how can we safely define a dream.

I am a big believer in very detailed phenomenological and qualitative analysis rather than seeking generalisations.