Sarcasm doesn't translate well into written word alone. — creativesoul
You and I agree Trump is venial. Don’t we have the same belief? — Banno
Subjective, whatever it is, is not private. — Banno
I don't want to be human! I want to see gamma rays. I want to hear X-Rays, and I want to smell dark matter. Do you see the absurdity of what I am? I can't even express these things properly because I have to conceptualize complex ideas in this stupd, limiting, spoken language. But I know I want to reach out with something other than these prehensile paws and feel a solar wind of a supernova FLOWING OVER over me. I'm a machine and I can know so much more, could experience so much more, but I'm trapped iin this absurd body ... — Brother Cavil, Battlestar Galactiica
OK; a divergence from common practice. Such things are worthy of care. So we do say things such as "Mww and Banno both believe that Trump is venial", but whereas casually that seems to be attributing the very same belief to us both, you're suggesting it is to be analysed in a deeper way by looking to private... somethings... to which others do not have access.I’d rather say we have the same agreement. — Mww
An experience is not a concrete thing like cups and taste buds are. It instead describes your practical contact with things in the environment, which occurred at some time and location.
— Andrew M
1. Isn't the "practical" (physical?) contact between you and your environment a "concrete thing"?
— Luke
No, it's an abstraction over concrete things. It describes something that a person does or has. That is, no person, no experience. (Which we can appreciate if we substituted a robot for the person, since robots don't have experiences.) — Andrew M
2. Isn't there more to an "experience" than this physical contact? E.g. There's not just the "practical contact" experience of light entering the eye, there's also the experience of seeing red.
— Luke
Those aren't experiences, at least on an ordinary definition. This is a good example of how we're using language in completely different ways. — Andrew M
Experience isn't merely physical contact. A robot can do physical contact. But it isn't therefore something separate from physical contact either (which would be dualism). It's an abstraction over that physical contact in a manner applicable to human beings. — Andrew M
And I would add that the practical contact is between the cup/coffee and the person, not between the person's eyes and the photons. The latter is detail about the physical process and operates at a different level of abstraction than what I'm describing here. — Andrew M
seems to have given up. His contribution was pivotal, giving a solid foundation to the physiological background.
Or to put it another way, most of this thread is his fault. — Banno
I just don't see the point in continuing a discussion in which the primary counter-argument is "...but it's obvious". — Isaac
Nowhere, to my knowledge. That would be self-contradictory and thus in my opinion highly unlikely to ever happen. But there were on this thread many attempts to deny a phenomenological ‘layer’, a ‘representation’ of the world constructed in (or for) our minds based on sense data, and we know that’s precisely what Dennett is after: the idea of a mental theater.Where has any scientist reduced minds to brains? — Isaac
science IS NOTHING BUT representation of reality by minds. — Olivier5
I just don't see the point in continuing a discussion in which the primary counter-argument is "...but it's obvious" — Isaac
a social game of agreeing to pretend that these symbols point at the world, according to principles of pointing that differ in interesting ways from those of art, music and literature? — bongo fury
Where has any scientist reduced minds to brains? — Isaac
Nowhere, to my knowledge. — Olivier5
there were on this thread many attempts to deny a phenomenological ‘layer’, a ‘representation’ of the world constructed in (or for) our minds based on sense data — Olivier5
With eyes designed to perceive only a tiny fraction of the EM spectrum!
with eyes designed to order and classify objects according to only a tiny fraction of the variation in their EM reflectivity!
their EM wavelength! — Marchesk
You do take many things as obvious. For instance, if you hold up a hand and say "Here's a hand.”, there's nothing wrong with that. There's no ontological commitment in that.
Clean away the strawmen piled in the idea of phenomenal consciousness, and it's the same situation. — frank
it seems to me that yours is a path to an unneeded and misleading superstructure... — Banno
This is were I differ, since it seems to me that those things which are private, ineffable, inaccessible, are also not suitable for analysis. — Banno
Kant, like Wittgenstein, pointed to stuff about which we cannot speak. We should take their advice, and not. — Banno
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