Because you occupy different location in space, and especially because you seem to move infependently from the forces of nature. I guess I could say then, because you seem unnatural. — Zelebg

Every atom occupies a different location in space from every other, so that alone doesn't provide any grounds, not to mention the fact that 3d space seems to be a model which itself is open to question.

Which are 'the forces of nature' and which are my movements, prior to identifying me as an entity?

If it is the case that you don't think other people exist, then there must be something wrong with you saying "other people exist". — creativesoul

Yes, that's what I thought you meant. Which is why my answer was "it depends what you mean by 'wrong'".

If you mean objectively 'wrong' in a normative sense - 'one ought not to say "other people exist"', then you'd be suggesting that my believing something to be the case somehow creates a normative imperative for other people to agree, and speak that way. I wouldn't agree with you here.

If by 'wrong' you mean ineffective, not conducive to the task, then again, I disagree because we use different models for different tasks and most of the time, the model in which people don't exist is not very useful. That doesn't in any way prevent me from believing it to be the case.


I'm not going to continue to list all the other senses of 'wrong' you could have meant and their implications, you get the picture. I need to know what you mean by 'wrong' before I can answer your question.

I've no issue at all with saying that. Do you? — creativesoul

Saying what? I've lost your thread.

A and B can agree as to the facts, by considering what looks like from the other's point of view. — Banno

Only if both A and B agree on what defines @. @ is not 'seen' at all, it does not 'look like' anything from any perspective without a model which defines @ as being something distinct from everything surrounding it. We must already decide what @ is, then look to see if we were right. The looking doesn't come first, the model of @ comes first, the looking is just to check.

Supposedly, the body is meant to make the identity, but this is not the case. We find the presence of the body is not granting the identity at all. The body is silent upon identity. The body is not making or stopping anyone being male, female or anything else.

This is a huge point: it means having a sperm or eggs does not make one male, female or anything else. If one has an identity, it must be given by a truth of identity. — TheWillowOfDarkness

This is nonsense. You're redefining the term 'identity' to mean something it never meant in this context. I completely agree with you that sex is a social construct, we decide arbitrarily that these bodily characteristics are going in the 'male' construct and those are going in the 'female' construct. It could have been any other way, it could be some other way tomorrow. Nothing about reality is determining that these particular criteria apply to these constructs, nor that these constructs need even exist at all.

But - there's no justification at all for introducing some new force which somehow assigns identity to arbitrary social constructs. How would it even know such constructs exist? 'Truth of identity' doesn't mean anything. One is not 'truthfully' male or female because male and female are words labelling artificial social constructs, nothing about your intrinsic being even knows these words, let alone 'truthfully' assigns you to one.

If people want to be grouped by different criteria from the ones currently used to group people, then that's fine, maybe their community of language users will change the criteria. If people feel actually harmed by being grouped that way, then maybe we should enforce change in the criteria, to help them out (depending, of course on the consequences on others). If people want to be in one of the social constructs that their community wouldn't normally assign them, then that seems fine to me too, just label them the way they prefer. But there's absolutely no need to introduce some flaky notion of 'truth' into the matter, it just feeds the worst stereotypes of post-modernism, and it's utterly unsupported.

People do use ‘mode’ to mean ... well, mode. It is the manner/regard/approach used. — I like sushi

Right, but you said...

Phenomenology is the investigation into the ‘modes’ (intentionality) that ‘give aboutness’. — I like sushi

No 'mode' in the ordinary language sense (approach used) can 'give aboutness' in the same ordinary language sense because 'aboutness' is not a term in ordinary language either. A particular approach to thinking gives aboutness? Is that what you mean?

And none of this seems to at all address the concern I've been raising all along which is how we then proceed to speak about the results of these investigations without being able to use terms which both parties recognise the referents of, and if both parties recognise the referents, then the matter is not subjective, is it?

What on earth could be wrong with saying "other people exist"? — creativesoul

Depends what you mean by 'wrong'. As a model, it's a brilliant one - useful, elegant, highly accurate predictions. But as some objective measure of the way reality 'really' is...I'll ask the same as I asked Marchesk above - what would the criteria for such a distinction be?

I'm confused as to how patterns can be recognized or in error if there is no pattern matcher or mind or self or whatever we want to call the organizing principle that makes sense of the flux (finds patterns). — Marchesk

There isn't no pattern matching. I'm not saying that nothing exists and that things don't happen. Pattern matching is happening in some part of reality, part of that pattern matching is identifying the thing doing the matching, in the same way as if I count the number of people on my bus the person doing the counting is one of those people part of the pattern [number of people} is the thing recognising the pattern. I'm disputing that there is an edge to that pattern making goings on that objectively defines it as one thing and the rest of the universe as other things(s).

I (and others) haven't arrived at this belief because it's the way the world seems to us to be, We've arrived at it becasue of a failure to feel satisfied with any objective criteria for distinguishing objects. So If you've got such a criteria, then we can ditch the whole idea of model dependent realism. Say an alien comes to earth, they don't even see in colour like we do, they detect some other part of the electromagnetic spectrum, and maybe the Weak Nuclear Force directly, maybe they have completely different model of how evolution and DNA works (afterall, we had a completely different model 200years ago). Give me an reason why they would still recognise you as one thing and me as another. Or even you as one thing and the chair you're sitting on as another.

I'm asking how the pattern matching occurs in the flux of things. — Marchesk

There is no pattern matching, there's just the flux of thing. The only way we can talk about pattern matching going on is by agreeing to a model in which there are such things as patterns and matching.

In any case, that sets up a dichotomy between the flux and the pattern matching, because we can ask how our patterns match up with the flux of the world. — Marchesk

Just because we can ask something, doesn't mean the world is the way the question assumes.

Patterns will always match up some way with the world, and will always be in error some way (because they are not the actual world).

Quibble away. Give me a reason to think that the boundary between 'I' and 'not I' is one which would continue to exist (differently to the boundary between two other molecules of 'me') without some model determining that these molecules belong together as one thing, whilst these others belong together as another.

When I say people don't exist, I'm not suggesting there's nothing there, it's the grouping, the distinguishing, I'm disputing, not the existence of anything at all.

But then how does the subdividing happen? — Marchesk

Same way anything happens, I'm not sure what you're asking here.

What's making the distinctions? — Marchesk

Depends on what model I'm using. I don't believe it's possible to refer without models, so I can't answer a 'what' question outside of some model dividing the world into individual referrents.

Based on what? — Marchesk

I went through this earlier in the thread. Just because I don't believe in any objective division of the world into parts, doesn't mean I think it's homogeneous.

Doesn't that imply a pre-existing order?

And if there is a pre-existing order, then we have some basis for inferring it. — Marchesk

No, I don't see any logical reason for it to imply anything more than heterogeneity. We can identify a pattern in a random sequence of dots, does that mean the pattern was really there all along? Yes, I think so. But does that mean the pattern is the way the random sequence is? No. It's just one pattern that can be determined out of many.

So what you're saying is that other people exist, it's just that our talk of other minds is itself a model, and the model can be disputed. You're disputing the model that the experiences of other minds is inaccessible. That subjectivity is fundamentally different from objectivity. And thus you disagree with the hard problem of consciousness, that it's a "hard" problem. — Marchesk

So close, it's hardly worth quibbling, but I don't think other people exist either. I think the real world, all that is the case, exists. Any division of that into separate objects, forces, etc are just models, just one way of subdiving things, among other options.

The distinction being one between the appearance of the world to us, and how the world actually is. — Marchesk

Yes, only I don't see how there can possibly be a way the world really is. Any 'ways' it could be require distinction (shape and form, even if only figurative) and I cannot see any convincing way in which distinction can be the case without anyone doing the distinguishing.

It would be like if everyone had their own home, but no one was allowed to go into others' homes, there was no way to take pictures of others' homes, etc. The person who lived there would know exactly what it's like inside, but other people wouldn't. That wouldn't stop anyone from talking about what their homes are like inside, however. — Terrapin Station

What words would they use then?

The ‘regard’ is the ‘mode’ in the sense I meant it. — I like sushi

Replacing one idiosyncratic technical term with another is hardly an explanation. A system which can only be explained in terms of its own technical language is just waffle. You need to bridge what you think Husserl means by his technical terms by reference to ordinary language. No one ordinarily use 'mode' to mean anything like what you're using it to mean.

For one, imagine if folks were interested in others persons' views simply because they find other people and their differences interesting. — Terrapin Station

Ha! Very drole.

If so, I guess he's arguing with himself — Marchesk

This doesn't follow. A belief that the distinction of another mind is just a model is not the same as saying that only I exist. I'm quite convinced the external world exists (I actually think it is impossible to genuinely doubt that), I just don't agree that the distinctions we draw are real outside of our minds. It's like star signs, all there really are is just stars, we drew lines between some of them to make lions, bears, hunters etc, but those aren't real properties of those stars, we just looked at them that way.

(note - an reasonable alternative, to my mind, would be to say that the similarity to a bear was a property of that cluster of stars, but everything else it could possibly be is also a property, leaving everything with a potentially infinite set of properties. I think this makes sense, but is far less elegant)

you don't have someone else's pain. — Marchesk

What would "someone else's pain" mean here? I don't have you're chair either but it doesn't prevent me from both understanding what a chair is and talking coherently about chairs.

we can't always know what they are, or infer the correct mental states. — Marchesk

But we've been through this without you answering my questions, but you're just circling back to the same assertion. If there are times when we can't know what they are ('can't', not just 'don't happen to on that particular occasion'), then how would we ever know what word to use to describe it?

Men can't know exactly what it's like to give birth. — Marchesk

This just presumes there's 'something it's like' to give birth, which is the whole matter under contention here. If you're talking about that exact set of feelings, then no one can know what it's like to give birth, not even the person who's just given birth. Our memories absolutely demonstrably do not provide us with an accurate account of the feelings we experienced even seconds ago. In order for anyone to know what anything 'is like' by that token we have to generalise. In which case a detailed verbal description gives a perfectly good account of 'what it's like'.

Everyone has their own subjective experience of themselves and the world. — Marchesk

How would you know this? There are 7 billion people on the planet right now, about 10 billion ever. Are there 10 billion combinations of feelings anyone can have at any moment? What if there were 100 billion people, would there still be enough variety for everyone to have a unique set? Will we run out at some time? What is the mechanism which prevents two people from having the same set?

To which I say hogwash, pain without the experience is meaningless. — Marchesk

What is 'the experience' if not the behaviours?

And it's something that can be faked. — Marchesk

Again, how would you know this unless you found out they were faking by some eventual difference between their behaviour and the behaviour of someone who is genuinely in pain?

Based upon those experiments, I am quite certain that there is some sort of sensitivity to equitable resource distribution(in some non human primates). I am quite certain that there is empathy at work(in some non human primates more-so than others). I am quite certain that there is some sort of expectation at work(in all non human primates). I'm not as certain that there is enough evidence to conclude a sense of fairness at work in the thought and belief of any particular candidate. However, it's quite interesting that some dominant individuals will voluntarily share. — creativesoul

Yes. I think that's a pretty good summary of where the current evidence is at, in terms of what we can be fairly sure of and what there remains some considerable doubt over. I'm basically at the same place as you, only I'm presuming they do have a sense of fairness and waiting to see if I'm proven wrong by further experiments, you're presuming they don't and waiting to see if you're proven wrong by further experiments. Possibly this is because of other philosophical commitments we both have about the nature of mental phenomena.

Objects are processes, and we can talk about processes that are not normally thought of as objects just as well, because they're phenomena just as well. — Terrapin Station

I have no clue how this relates to what I said.

As to the rest of your post...

Yeah, I'm aware of the fact that you have a different opinion, so simply restating it is not contributing anything.

I disagree that phenomena does not refer to imagined objects (in the sense I was using in context) because of my beliefs about how the brain works (all apparent phenomena are imagined objects, models created and tested for efficacy against reality which is not directly accessed).

I disagree that representationalism is wrong re the philosophy of perception. You don't make it so simply by declaring it is.

I disagree that you know light waves by looking at them for the masses of neuroscientific reasons I've been outlining in this thread. Again, simply saying something is the case does not make it so.

If we've now come to the usual point where you just declare whatever seems to you to be the case to actually be the case, then I'm done. All that's left is for you to call me a moron (or a child, or uneducated, whatever is your preferred term de jour) and then tell me my reading comprehension is to blame, then we can call it a day.

So first, the effects are phenomena. If you only access those phenomena by their effects, you'd never access any phenomena. — Terrapin Station

I didn't say that no phenomena weren't directly accessible though. I just said that all phenomena 'of the world' were accessed (in terms of us knowing about them) by other phenomena that they cause. At no point does the phenomena we imagine as being the real object (in your terminology this might be the noumena, the 'real thing'), at no point does that just enter our minds directly, it is some effect it has by which we know of it.

Now for you, the thing we thereby know is some property of reality, for me it's just another phenomena (an imagined object in a speculative model), but this distinction isn't even relevant here. The point here is that whatever 'it' is, we know it by some effect it is having, yet this doesn't cause us to label such knowledge as 'inaccessible to third parties'. The movement of a stone isn't known only to the stone by virtue of the fact that we only see the effect of that movement on our retinas. So why is the disposition of some brain known only to that brain just on the same grounds that we only see the effects of that disposition?

the mental phenomenon is not identical to any third-person observable behavior. — Terrapin Station

No, but the mental phenomenon is a disposition towards some behaviour, so it is accessible in exactly the same way all other phenomena of the world are accessible, by their effects.

The idea is clearly about someone feeling some way at an earlier time, where there was no behavioral clue that they felt that way at the time — Terrapin Station

Right, and I'm obviously not disputing that fact. I'm disputing the implication drawn earlier in the argument that this means we should accept 'experiences vlike pain as being subjective, inaccessible to third parties.

If this were the case purely because there is a time delay between the experience initiating and us, the third party, being aware of it, then we could apply that logic to every single form of knowledge. There is a delay between an object moving and us being aware of it, we don't use that delay to claim that the movement of objects is mysteriously unavailable to third parties. It is unavailable, for the short time it takes for light to reach our eyes, but we find out eventually, and that's satisfactory, we count that as 'knowable' information.

The situation with feelings is the same. They manifest eventually as behaviours and are therefore knowable to third parties.

The way you know that the person had the feeling that no external behavior gave a clue to is that they tell you at some later time. — Terrapin Station

And telling you at some later time isn't a behaviour? Or, if you want to say "well we didn't know at time X", then surely that applies equally to all data. Everything has some delay, even things we observe; we see them move, say, shortly after they actually have moved. We don't start saying that external world movements are mysteriously unknowable to us because there's some period of time where the knowledge was inaccessible. We're just happy to find out when we do.

I'm sure @fdrake has this covered but you're so frustratingly close I couldn't help but intervene.

You defined "gender" as a social construction. — Harry Hindu

Yes.

"Social construction" is defined as a shared assumption or expectation. — Harry Hindu

Yes (broadly)

This means that "gender" would be kind of shared assumption or expectation, but a shared assumption or expectation of what?

The answer: the behavior of the different sexes within a culture. — Harry Hindu

Yes

So, again you are confusing a shared assumption or expectation with the actual sexual identity of that person, which is the result of millions of years of evolution and nothing that they have any control over. — Harry Hindu

No. You've just conceded that gender is a social construction, so it's not a confusion at all. Social constructions are like the boxes available on a census form, you still get to pick which one to tick.

Yes, some social constructions are sexist (that's my particular beef with some radical trans philosophy that seems to reify such constructions), but..

The important thing is that people are required to choose anyway in order to take part in the culture which has just constructed those options.

So the trans thing is really about support for a choice between options which someone else presented but where 'none of the above' isn't an option.

Note - philosophically, 'none of the above' is what I agree with, but practically it can only go one way, society changes the choices first.

Again, how would we know? Without any external signs, how do the judges, jurors, doctors etc know that there is some feeling in the subject which they have misidentified (or missed entirely) for you to form this judgement that they regularly do this? I can see how they might temporarily make this mistake, but later find out they were in error. But this later updating of their assessment would be the result of some behavior. Absent of any behaviour at all, they'd have no way to know they were ever wrong and so you'd have no way to know that they regularly get these things wrong.

Yes, but we also don't have any method that will allow us to always read the signs. — Marchesk

What reason have you got to think this?

The sensation correlates with other human behavior enough of the time in situations that are often painful to use that word for it. — Marchesk

But how would you know that? The sensation which allows you to continue without displaying any signs cannot be the same as the one which does not. Or are you claiming that we are voluntarily in control of all our external behaviors, even the micro expressions, galvanic skin responses, recoil defence etc which experts use to detect things like pain?

If we're not in control of all those autosomic responses, then a sensation which does not cause them must be a different sensation to one which causes them, no?

Even if we were to simply assume the two sensations were similar enough, you'd be positing a mental sensation which had absolutely no effect on you whatsoever. Where would the signal go? Or are you perhaps a dualist?

@Marchesk

Also, you haven't tried to answer my questions. How would you know that what you're experiencing is called 'pain'? How do you know you're using the word correctly?

Alright, so have you ever found out someone was feeling discomfort when you didn't realize it, or vice versa? — Marchesk

Yes. My not noticing the signs and there not being any signs to notice are two different things.

we don’t tend to consider being on Earth orbiting the Sun. We are, yet now that I’ve drawn attention to this our ‘intentionality’ shifts. As soon as the question of ‘existence’ is brought into play then our ‘intentionality’ shifts to phenomenon as existing ‘objects’. — I like sushi

OK, that makes sense. In my terminology, that would be the active variance reduction seeking if the system relating to the model currently in focus. Our models of the world are utility based, they don't necessarily join up, nor even fail to contradict one another, so focus needs to be confined to the model at hand in order to gain more confirming data for it. Maybe that's still too 'sciency', but I can see some common ground there.

The phenomenon is the subjective regard. — I like sushi

This is the bit I hit a wall with. We 'regard' a phenomena, yes? So having regarded it, we presumably then want to say something about it? Otherwise the activity is simply silent meditation. So when it comes to saying something about it, the words we use must have some effect on the community to whom we're speaking, which means they must either already know, or be able to gather by your actions, what to do with the word you've used. (more simply, what the word refers to, but I'm trying to be accurate here and words do not always refer).

So I kind of get how introspection might allow us to recognise a focus on different models (intentionality?), I get how we could conduct thought experiments on such modes to find out more about them. I'm stuck on how we could ever communicate the results to anyone without invoking community-held (objective) definitions for the words we're using, which means the referrents for those words have to be objectively verifiable to some loose extent.

But we don't and we can't always identify what someone else is experiencing. That's just a fact of our existence. — Marchesk

It's a fact I dispute, a fact I'm asking for your support of, your empirical evidence for. To say something is 'just a fact' is quite a strong assertion (it implies that any and all theories which assume it isn't are all untenable), so it's one I'd expect a significant amount of evidence for.

People can choose to ignore minor pains. I have a headache, but if it's not severe, I don't have to say anything or hold my head. I can just ignore it and focus on something else. — Marchesk

Then how do you know that feeling is a 'pain'? How do you know it isn't some feeling other people are calling something else entirely?

It's not hidden from me because pain is a subjective experience that can be accompanied by behavior, but not always. — Marchesk

I'm talking about the time when you claim it is hidden. Again, it is not a 'fact' simply by your declaring it to be one.

It’s like you read what I wrote with the singular intent to disagree. Yet you agreed and didn’t realise. I plainly said it wasn’t about what exists. I then said ‘existence’ as an ‘object’ of consciousness does matter. — I like sushi

It doesn't matter one jot what terminology you want to use. Call it 'it'. 'It' cannot be used in a conversation with another person unless that other person has some idea what it is you're referring to by, or expecting to achieve by using, 'it'. The use of 'it' must be bounded by at least some joint understanding of that use, some collective, community venture, it cannot be solely subjective otherwise it is useless as a term of communication.

But it isn't, or we'd always know whether someone was in pain. There's even medical situations where a patient will complain about a condition their doctor can't see a symptom for, resulting in the suspicion that it's psychological. Sometimes it is, and sometimes it turns out the patient was right.

But in either case, the point is the patient experiences some form of discomfort that isn't objectively identified. — Marchesk

I've certainly never encountered such a situation. You're suggesting that a patient might come to a doctor, telling them that they're in pain, but show absolutely no signs at all of being in pain, no alterations to their movements, no sensitivity to touch, no defence recoil, no adjustment to their daily life, nothing...just the statement "I'm in pain". I think in that situation the doctor would quite rightly say "no you're not", that's not what pain is, you've misidentified your feeling".

Pain always results in some behaviour to the effect of demonstrating the pain, even if it's just a micro-expression, even if it's delayed. Until that point we might 'suspect' pain, but we do not know it's pain.

Again, I'll ask, how would you possibly know what 'pain' is (which of your many feelings is the one correctly called 'pain') if you could not identify it at all times in others? If there was even one circumstance where the correct feeling to call 'pain' was hidden from you completely, how would you know that some other feeling you're having is actually also called 'pain', afterall, it might be the one that's been hidden from you? How would anyone properly use the word 'pain' if no-one knew the basic extent of which feelings were to be grouped under that term?

Could you explain the patterns of reward in these experiments? The above is too vague to know what the experiments entailed. — creativesoul

I'd have to just track down the paper, I'll have a look for a non-paywall version.I don't think this format is an appropriate write out the details of what amounts to a very large field consisting of decades of research. If you're amenable to an idea, I can point you in the direction of some more in depth resources (which I hope I have done), but I think that's the limit of a series of short posts. Certainly if you're largely opposed to it, nothing I can write in a few hundred words is going to be sufficient to convince you. Imagine the entire volumes of work that's been done on this, all that writing was not wasteful padding, so I can't give a thorough account without simply repeating it. Does that make sense?

So... All behavioural discontent due to unmet expectations counts as thinking, believing like what has happened is unfair/unjust and/or ought be somehow corrected? — creativesoul

The main thrust of my view is that all beliefs are identifiable by the behaviours they instantiate and are themselves, literally, the arrangement of brain architecture which gives rise to these behaviours. The details of exactly what they that behaviour consists of is undoubtedly quite complex. That being said I think the above gives a fairly reasonable sketch, yes, but it is undoubtedly more complex.

Show me an animal not under duress who receives all of the resources and voluntarily distributes them equally, and we'll have an animal that either likes the results of doing that or an animal who has shown a sense of fairness. — creativesoul

Again, it's probably best if you just read the literature yourself. Heres a deWaal paper with a considerable number of links to the primary evidence. He talks about sharing and the various models that have been proposed to describe it on page 6.

This requires thinking about one's own thought and belief(what ought to have happened) while also thinking about what did happen. Language use is necessary for that sort of division of thought content and subsequent comparison. Thus, language use is necessary for having a sense of ought/fairness/justice.

An agreement most certainly requires language, as it is to stipulate one's own acceptance of certain things(conditions). — creativesoul

Again, you've simply asserted that language use is required for these things, I'd like to hear your full argument for how you link the two. At the moment, as I see it, you seem to be saying that gestures, facial expressions, arrangements of neurons in any way...none of these are capable of carrying the content you're looking for, but making a particular shape with my mouth and voice box magically carries this other world of content. I just don't see how at all.

we can look at the context of someone's identical actions and infer their intentions. — Marchesk

Right, so actions in one context=pain, actions in some other context=pretending. This is still all externally identifiable. Objective.

Ultimately because at some point primate/monkey ancestors developed mirror neurons and were able to formulate some theory of mind to understand other people's actions. — Marchesk

No, that's not how mirror neurons work, they only indicate intentions related to behaviours, they can't magically distinguish different intentions from identical behaviours.

How can examining our behaviour when describing something that exists in it's entirety prior to our naming it be adequate for examining the referent? — creativesoul

I wasn't talking about our behaviour whilst describing it, I was talking about our behaviour whilst experiencing it.

By watching people pretend and being told they were pretending, then doing the same thing myself. — Marchesk

How did the people who told you they were pretending find that out?

How would I know that people can pretend to be in pain, like actors or liars? Is that really going to be your argument? — Marchesk

No, how do you know that such actions can sometimes not be pain. How did you learn that?

That isn't what we mean by pain.

Why not? Because I can write around pretending to be in pain, or maybe for some other reason like a seizure. — Marchesk

How would you know?

I said ‘object’, as in intentionality, ‘conscious of’, not some noumena fancy. ‘Object’ in the sense of this discussion isn’t an existent object, ‘existence’ is an ‘object’ of intentional experience. — I like sushi

It's existence makes no difference, 'unicorns' don't exist, the idea of 5 dimensional space doesn't exist... None of this makes them immune from the fact that in order to talk about them we must agree on a referent for the term. None of this makes them immune from the requirement to delineate things along the same lines as others in order to talk to them about those things.

Phenomenology (Husserlian) is precisely a field of philosophical thought that came into being to deal with these questions. — I like sushi

The mere existence of a field which aims to do something does not in any way constitute evidence that it succeeds in that task.

Turn that around and you have the same problem. If there were no subjective experiences of pain how would we ever learn the word? We wouldn't, because it wouldn't be an experience for us. — Marchesk

Yes, but why does it have to be a subjective experience for this to be the case? 'Pain' we all learn, is the word we use to indicate whatever it is that motivates us to those particular sorts of actions. There need not be any subjectivity to it (as in inaccessible to physicalism). I could be a robot and still learn to label the tweaking of my diodes which causes me to writhe about and cry 'pain'.

(notwithstanding the fact that we all know robots are prone to pain, especially in all the diodes down their left side)