What does this say about the inaccessibility of the first-hand, subjective, experience? If we can use external machines to read the thoughts of a person, and what we see on the machine's screen isn't the first-hand, subjectiveness of their experience, rather it is numbers and letters, or lines on a graph that represent their first-hand, subjective experiences, then can we really say that we are getting at their first-hand, subjective experience?Can we be able(in future) to use some machine to read the thought of person? Is it accorded with the philosophy? — nguyen dung
Why would I need to have their experience if I can have information about their first-hand experience and still get the same relevant information? — Harry Hindu
Can we be able(in future) to use some machine to read the thought of person? Is it accorded with the philosophy? — nguyen dung
Thoughts are bound up in the individual experience of whoever has them, and you cannot recreate them without copying the entire person. — Echarmion
The trouble with that approach is it seems to set an unreasonably high bar not consistent with other objects. No one has any objection to me talking about 'this chair' yet have I captured all that is this chair, it's history, it's place in my life, it's connections to other stuff in the world, it's fuzzy boundary at the fundamental particle scale? No. But it's just fine to talk about 'this chair' nonetheless. I don't see why 'this thought' should be treated any differently. I'm thinking broadly about a chair. Yes the exact nature of that thought is inextricably linked to my whole ecosystem (as we're discussing on the other thread at the moment). But insofar as "have this machine read thought X?" is concerned, I don't see any reason why a loose similarity should not be sufficient to answer "yes". — Isaac
What I had in mind was the "pop culture" version of mind reading, where you literally hear someone's thoughts the way they sound in their head. And that probably requires you to model their entire brain — Echarmion
in order to gather more than just very basic emotions, you'll probably need to know a lot about the structure of the specific brain you're trying to read thoughts from, since you'd need to know the connections between neurons to determine what their activity means. So in that sense, the history of the brain is much more important to it's current state than the history of a chair might be. — Echarmion
But why would I need the qualia to know what they are thinking? Doesn't qualia let us know what form their knowledge/awareness takes, rather than what their knowledge/awareness is about? Isn't what it is about what is important and useful? Why would I need to access their qualia?Why would I need to have their experience if I can have information about their first-hand experience and still get the same relevant information?
— Harry Hindu
Well you'd be missing the qualia. — Echarmion
Why would we need to directly read thoughts? If we get the information we need by getting at what their thoughts are about, then what else would we need, and why?Can we be able(in future) to use some machine to read the thought of person? Is it accorded with the philosophy?
— nguyen dung
It's probably impossible to directly read thoughts. Thoughts are bound up in the individual experience of whoever has them, and you cannot recreate them without copying the entire person.
You can probably still extract a lot of information though. — Echarmion
Could we (in future) use some machine to read the thoughts of a person? Is it accorded with the philosophy? — nguyen dung
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