That there is a "what it's like" aspect to consciousness is plain. — frank
Did you do it? — frank
If you think either science or philosophy could investigate such a question, what could the answer possibly consist in. — Isaac
Chalmers suggested that a way to start would be to add the concept of first person experience to the scientific tool box (in the same way gravity was added, as something we know about but haven't explained yet.) — frank
Experience — frank
But that just goes back to the first person accounts neuroscience uses to correlate its mechanically detected data with. How is that not 'experience'? — Isaac
The notion that experience does somehow reduce to functions of consciousness is an interesting speculation, but that's all it is presently. — frank
Are you familiar with Chalmers' Hard Problem? — frank
Do you have some reason for wanting to add some additional constituent (other than brains), that wouldn't also apply to every physical system too complex to describe reductively? — Isaac
no amount of studying human sexuality in the third person can tell you what it’s like to have sex. You have to experience it in the first person to know that. Maybe that book learning can help you recreate an accurate first person experience of it, but you still have to then undergo that experience to know what it’s like. That’s all there is to “what it’s like”; nothing deeply ontological about it, but it’s something. — Pfhorrest
That doesn’t have to have any ontological implications, I’m a hardcore physicalist myself; it just means that observing someone else undergoing something is different from undergoing it yourself. That should be a trivial truism, neither denied nor held to be of some deep philosophical importance. — Pfhorrest
But then you seemed to back away from that, and you argue that though we lack a robust theory, we need not expect a scientific revolution to cover phenomenal experience. — frank
We don't do science by eliminating any path that might turn the world upside down for us. We follow crazy ideas because we're courageous and flexible and amazingly good looking. — frank
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