Firstly, you don't know that. If people are souls, and souls exist prior to birth, then it is possible they do consent to being born — John

There is no coherent way a pre existing soul could force someone to be their parent.

As a childless person how could a pre existing soul force me to be their parent?

By creating a child through intercourse the parents are making it possible for a new person arise and Without that sex act, which I have never heard being blamed in spirits ,then a soul could not enter this temporary realm.

Why are people so desperate to create this temporary state that ends in certain death? Death either makes us oblivious we ever existed or we go back to the hypothetical spirit world.

I have cared on and off for a relative who has now been seriously ill for around 15 years (paralysed, feeding tube etc). Imagining a cosy family unit is nice fantasy but the reality is often harsher. I can enjoy my fantasy infallible family in my head.

Don't get distracted. Focus on rape and suffering. Feel bad yet? — Sapientia

The whole point of antinatalism is that suffering is very real including thousands of rapes everyday. That is what needs focusing on because these are real people condemned to suffer.

If there wasn't war, genocide, torture, famine and so on, there would be less antinatalists.

The issue of consent runs deep. Consent to existence seems like a minor problem for someone thoroughly enjoying life. But consent is a glaring issue for those suffering and in various cases forced to commit suicide. But I am focusing on the contradiction or hypocrisy of valuing consent at all when the nature of creating somone is the complete opposite of consent.

Imagine someone has been brutalised as child (a Yazidi child by ISIS say) Then they are sitting next to someone on a bus and accidentally step on their toe getting up. The person gets angry at them( like sometimes happen.) It is ludicrous that a minor perceived violation of someone causes distress but these accidents and impositions are nothing like having a whole child hood or lifetime of pain imposed on you by nature or others.

And the answer is that this is only an issue when we're actually talking about a person, which entails that they have opinions about these sorts of things, etc. — Terrapin Station

But you're opinion is at odds with the law. People have been imprisoned for criminal intentions and these intentions have not been aimed at a specific person. People have made plans to abuse children when they are born.

I think you are being disingenuous. If someone told you" I am going to have children because I want to make money from child pornography and have fun torturing them" would you ignore their intentions because there plans for children that did not yet exist? That is an extreme case which has actually been documented however.

But there are more common cases like drug addicts having children, religious fanatics, alcoholics an so on. There are a wide range of people that we can easily assess would make bad parents that would damage a child, before their child is actually conceived. Almost everyone has a scenario in which they think someone else is an inappropriate parent, most pro-lifers probably oppose gay surrogacy cases. So it is quite easy to consider the fate of a child before it is conceived or cast judgement on parenting aspirations.

Just like you can assess the probability of your future child getting cancer etc.

I thought rape was basically defined by lack of consent. Sex without consent is rape. It is not the sex act that is the problem but the lack of consent.

So with life it is not the quality of life that is the issue but the lack of consent.

It's reasonable to expect that there are no positive consequences for the person raped. Saving the life of a person in coma would be far more accurate. — BlueBanana

The issue we are discussing is whether you can harm someone or behave immorally if the person is unable to consent. The counter argument is you can't harm someone by creating them. They didn't exist when you made the decision to create them.

Some people are raped on many occasions as a child and that is a product of creating them. If life was paradise then consent would be less of an issue but that is far from the exploitative unequal world we actually live in.

The main issue however is that no one consented to come into existence and that undermines argument concerning consent. How can we say it is wrong to infringe someone's consent when, how we were created was nonconsensual?

People do reject life (suicide) or they just genuinely dislike it. You have to consider what it is like to be the victim in this scenario who didn't ask for life then suffer either through harms or just through not enjoying life itself.

That matters because they were a person with opinions about what they'd like done to them prior to being asleep or in a coma.

With a baby born who immediately goes into a coma, there are no consent issues re medical treatment. The baby wasn't a person with opinions about such things. And in fact, we even treat minors who might have opinions about such things as not being the ultimate arbiter for them. We don't legally or socially treat minors as fully autonomous persons. Hence why parents can force kids to do all sorts of things without issue. — Terrapin Station

Well I do have an issue "with parents forcing kids to do things"

I have never said to someone "don't rape me when I am asleep" someone does not need to voice an opinion explicitly for you to imagine how they might feel.(accurately)

I was forced to go to church several times of week and forced to go to school where I was getting bullied. So forcing things on children is not essential and benevolent. I prefer to ask a child how they feeling or read their expressions. Babies cry to express discontent. It is exactly childhood indoctrination that creates people willing to be imposed on. Lots of people justify bad doctrines and its all they've known.

A matter of wording or framing the problem, I guess, — OglopTo

An unconscious person cannot consent to sex but that does not make rape alright. An unconscious person will be able to consent in the future but then so will the child a person intends to have.

I don't think it is a genuine metaphysical problem because a lot of human life is based on confident predictions. It would only not be a problem if there was no evidence provided to parents that the world contained suffering or that a child would express desires.

It is not magical (unless that is ones metaphysical position) to be able to predict the future and contemplate the result of actions. Thoughts and concepts do not physically exist like a physical child (being abstract or mental) but they are a reality.

Consider what you're saying. How can you harm someone? There is no "someone." — Ciceronianus the White

I said you harm someone by creating them not be fore they exist. The act of creating them entails future harm. Creating someone is bringing them into existence
.
Some parents have been told that their child will inherit a genetic illness so they are actively creating a certainty of suffering. Are you claiming that the act of creating a person has no moral dimension even when you know full well what it will cause and what it entails. The law recognises intent to harm this way.

Just the first seconds of the below video will show you what harm can becaused by creating someone.


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9aAD0yJ3SdQ

If suicide is an option, then life is continued by consent once suicide is declined, which is by far the most prevalent choice. Ethically speaking, wouldn't it be the right thing to do to offer life, considering most often those offered it desperately protect it? — Hanover

Successful suicide is the tip of the iceberg more people attempt it or have suicidal ideation. The unwillingness to commit suicide does not logically denote the value of life.

Self preservation can be simply a biological instinct forced on one or based on hope or delusion. It is genuinely not easy to commit suicide the only reason it becomes easy is when you are in extreme pain mental usually or physical. I took two overdoses when I was younger. Why should someone be put in that situation in the first place?

You can't offer someone life because they don't exist initially. They can accept life once you've created them but they can't be deprived of it before they begin to exist.

I don't think consent is just an issue of whether the act in question brings happiness. Just the simple fact of not having consented can cause suffering (it does for me) I found it easier to be imposed upon as a child until I discovered it was unjustified.

People can't exercise their right to freedom of assembly before they're born, either. This doesn't create a massive ethical problem, it creates nonsense. — Sapientia

You are conflating my argument and Ciceronianuses response to it.
Life is founded on and created by a lack of consent. It is not created by stopping freedom of assembly.

It is created by a non consensual act. Creating a child does not impact on their ability to assemble but it does impact on consent because it is an nonconsensual act. How can you justify carrying out a non consensual act that affects someone else in the long run?

Intention matters also because you can be jailed for planning crime. If you planned to torture your child (as has happened) whilst trying to get pregnant you intend to behave immorally towards a future person who will exist.

Hiding behind the ambiguity of "existence" is unconvincing. Planning to create a child is planning to create someone you know by experience of other children/humans will have volition and exhibit consent issues

. The bottomline is that those in power eventually have to impose what they think is right to those who cannot decide for themselves — OglopTo

People claim that you can't impose on the unborn (a semantic issue in my opinion).

So when one is creating a child one can only be acting for their own sake or own desires. If one begin to imagine the desires of a hypothetical child then one can realise they may and will be different than one's own.

Consent becomes a problem as soon as life begins when we begin to infringe on people's ability to consent.

I don't see how we can have ethics without consent. If we just start forcing things on people then there is no logical justification for opposing them using force in return.

Where consent isn't possible, it's unreasonable, to say the least, to insist that it must be given. — Ciceronianus the White

Why is it unreasonable?

Would you say the same in the case of sleeping person or person in a coma? Consent is possible in the future of a persons life so it is not that the unborn will not have desires and opinions that can be thwarted.

The reason consent is not available before birth is because the person does not exist (in this form at least) So it is not that I am insisting consent be given I am saying that the act is never consensual.

We can never view an individual as having consented to life. Future consent is weak because you could compare it to consenting to sex after being raped. Or consenting to a meal after someone force fed you. (Ie ethically dubious)

Another analogy is if someone offers for you to chose between three boxes with hidden gifts but they withhold a fourth box with a million dollars/pounds in it. They have withheld the greatest choice from you.

Also we don't have immediate freedom after birth including freedom to reject life. It would be different if we started life able to consent to everything and make choices.

You are free to disregard any particular law if you think that obedience to it is a voluntary game, and you are prepared to live with the consequences. — geospiza

I think obeying a law is acting a part even if you think the law is very rational.

Some laws you don't break not because you are obeying them but because they address an inclination you don't have. I am not obeying the law by not committing murder because I am not restraining or altering my behaviour deliberately.

There are a huge number of laws most of which most people are unaware of so it is only in certain specific situations where you have to obey a law. Then when confronted with a law you need to obey you are usually resigned to do so. For example it says on some mutlipacks of chocolate bars "Do not resell seperately " It is not a major issue but like a lot of other small laws you just found yourself obeying.

There are even laws against suicide which are a bit futile after someone has killed themselves. I think law gets taken seriously because of the number of laws and sophistication of the system. When you have a huge law library it's going to sway some people into assuming laws legitimacy. But I think laws are often tools for manipulation, inequality or over-regulation and propagating norms etc and they are not benign or pragmatic.

So it is like a very complex game whose bureaucracy is its greatest weapon. It is hard to disentangle yourself from it but it is easy to argue that the whole edifice is based on illegitimate foundations. And if people support the law it can be very self serving because the law may be helping them prosper.

I think that laws are fictions like a lot of social ideas. I think people act towards law in the manner of "Bad faith" as described in Sartre.

It is easy to ignore a law but people will obey laws often completely unskeptically. I think that in order to make a law happen you have to join in a game and play a role (based on whatever societies current narrative is).

I believe that the idea that laws are to regulate society is far to benevolent an interpretation. I don't think that we have utopian societies in which laws simply regulate it for everyone's benefits. So I suppose I would personally describe a law as a linguistic tool that can be utilised in many different ways.

I don't think laws need to want to control people. A lot of them are simply pragmatic such as the traffic lights, to avoid chaos. Laws or rules can be like a framework for functioning. I think that when laws are reified (made as though concrete) then they become coercive and irrational.

I didn't think he was talking just about this board — Terrapin Station

I think philosophy forums go beyond what I would expect from a debate elsewhere. I don't expect a public/media debate to contain indepth analysis and dissection of every term. I am rather asking for some basic logic, awareness of logical fallacies and so on.

I think now that I have studied philosophy I can see logical fallcies and insufficient reasoning more readily. Philosophy can be liberating but unfortunately it can end up making you feel trapped in a superficial unreflective world.

There does seem to be a definite moral undercurrent to History where events are given moral weight especially in terms of slavery, colonialisation, women's rights etc. How much that happens cannot be morally analysed? Comunism seems to be a moral appraisal of capitalism and so on.

I think once you get to human motives (volition and so on) causality becomes murky. I suppose the closest to science would be a behaviourist analysis of history. A series of stimuli-response events.

I have read quite a lot of "Mein Kampf" and like a lot of Hitler's writings it is quite contradictory. I am not sure peoples motives are that easy to pin down. I favour a Freudian analysis personally. For instance Hitler overidentifying with the German people is a Freudian hallmark.

Hitlers stance on religion is widely debated but his opinons on it clearly underwent change so there is ambiguity there.

I feel that Hitler was an intelligent but irrational person. I am not sure you could rationally analyse his war aims.But I suppose as they say actions speak louder than words. Are we going to judge history on peoples actions or do we have to also invoke their words and mental states? I don't know.

You could say "what if Gemany had won the war and written the history books" But I don't think that would have been possible so maybe history is somewhat predictable or mechanistic. Can one persons desires and motives reallybe a major cause?

An so on..

Well yeah. I feel that they are manipulating history to justify current ideology. (Politicians, moralists, ideologues and so on).

I don't agree with historians using psychological analysis without emphasing that it is speculation.
I don't really know how to solve the problem of reporting history without bias and speculation.

In terms of wars I think causality equals blame. Blame and cause are used interchangeably. Blame seems to involve a strong causal claim beyond mere A causes B to invoking motives and desires.

To ask who was to blame for WW1 would involve a moral judgement but to simply report who acted first and caused the war that way, may be more valid and informative. I think there is a danger of reaching false conclusions any which way. I always advocate agnosticim in general.

But how controversial should the cause of the two world wars be anyway? Historians can just manufacture controversy.

What I find frustrating is when someone gives the impression of having scored a point or having supported their argument because they have inserted a false premise or hidden premise but the argument has emotional force anyway.

It can be hard work trying to explain how a conclusion doesn't follow from a premise and during that process you have lost peoples interest.

Someone might say "Most terrorists are Muslims so they are bad" He's a Muslim" "Therefore he's bad" and say that within the background of current problems. I Might even succumb to that myself. Then it is hard to overcome the emotions. With such emotive topics the emotion certainly makes cool headed logic hard.

The problem I have with religion is that I don't think it stands up to scrutiny. So that can make for frustrating debates and anger. I suppose both sides of a debate have to abide by the rules and in a lot of debates one or both sides are not being reasonable enought to reason with. I try and reason with Christian extremists in my family but it is like talking to a brick wall.

Wikipedia gives a straightforward example of the fallacy of denying the antecedent.

"If you are a ski instructor, then you have a job.
You are not a ski instructor
Therefore, you have no job"

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

This is the kind of conclusion I see happening in popular debates. The conclusions just don't follow from the premises.

It might be something like "Low taxation encourages inventiveness" "You want Higher taxation" "therefore you oppose inventiveness"... I could do an extensive discourse analysis of a debate but I feel they are intended to be polarising like this.

I think a lot hangs on valid arguments. If empirical facts are available they obviously need to inform premises. But also false conclusions should be weeded out.

I do think your scenario seems to reflect reality. It would be interesting to see what a world with minimum logical fallacies and based on strong evidence bases would be like.

If something is going to call itself a debate then logical fallacies should be exposed and avoided.

For example it is quite possible that someone could argue that the moon was made of cheese without making a logical fallacy and someone could make a logically fallacious argument defending the contrary position. I agree that debate does not need to concern the truth. The truth of premises can be discovered empirically ot not.

I think a lot of the time logical fallcies are deliberately employed or deliberately neglected because of the force of the argument containing the fallacy.

I don't think cold, hard, clear argument has emotional appeal.

I would agree there are emotional reasons for keeping ties with family. The pragmatism is in weighing up the costs and benefits. I suppose the emotional reasons are predominant. That is unfortunate because it is an emotional minefield. It seems family ties are the most emotionally driven.

A safety behaviour is to take the route of least hassle. I suppose it is a form of apathy. I am not sure what pragmatism is when applied to a scenario.

"IF running over somebody can not be avoided, THEN run over the fewest number" — Bitter Crank

This is where I see human judgement as being influenced by emotion. I think utilitarianism suffers from its statistical analysis where the individual is subsumed in calculations and at the danger of an individual's value being extinguished.
The classic thought experiment is whether or not we should kill one healthy person to give his or her organs to 5 people who urgently need organ transplants but almost no one thinks this is appropriate.

but at first glance, how i feel about things is not capable of being false. — unenlightened

It might be that you mistake a bush for a bear in the dark and have a surge of anxiety so the feeling is inappropriate because it was caused by a misjudgement.

If the emotion is claimed to be caused by a judgement, as is one theory, then the validity of the emotion would be linked to the validity of the judgement.

The hope for CBT I guess is that your emotions will fall more in line with reality. But that is why I am questioning here what might be an appropriate emotional respone to a judgement.

For example the fear of death. Some people say you shouldn't fear it because there is nothing to fear as you will cease to exist and can't therefore cannot experience the badness of death others might say don't fear it because there is a good afterlife awaiting us. The fear might fluctuate based on your current beliefs. I think death is a problem because we don't know what happens until we are dying so anything else is speculation. We are fearing a future unknown. I suffer from that fear of the unknown and wondering what might happen from an array of possibilities.

I don't think emotions can necessarily be severed from judgements in all cases, so that they have nothing but bodily causes. Perceiving something as a threat requires external stimuli and an interpretation. Fireworks might frighten someone who may perceive them as gunfire.

The problems is whether or not the quibbles or responses to a suggestion are rational. I suppose this is the dilemma of seeing whether a response is rational or emotional and how important the response is.

Should someone cut of contact with a family member who has hurt them because of the emotional hurt or should they be pragmatic and keep ties?

and I don't see why the designers shouldn't suffer the consequences if someone is run over by an AI. — Bitter Crank

I think the problem is intention. Apparently people have already been killed by self driving cars. But I think the problem is attributing a genuine intention behind the accident.

it reminds of the film series "Cube" from Canada where people are being tortured inside a cube shaped maze. They try to find out who is behind the set up but it turns out no one is and it is just out of control bureaucracy.

For instance, if you feel anxious when you go into a crowded store (this is just an example) try a little day dreaming. Imagine yourself going into a crowded store and feeling calm. — Bitter Crank

I will try this thanks because I suffer from this problem with crowded stores.

Being philosophically minded I find I can over critique these methods when I am trying to us them. I tend to feel my anxieties are rational. But I am not opposed to trying things, I just struggle to get into a positive headspace or body state.

It is a vicious cycle sometimes and you resent having to try so hard to function lol.

I went to a philosophy meet up and we were discussing Artificial intelligence and I was asking how A.I. could make moral judgements and similar decisions.

The topic of self driving cars was discussed at length. Would the car steer into 3 elderly persons to avoid killing a toddler? What kind of judgements could A.I. make and what would be its motivations?

Doing my best to be charitable to what on the face of it seems a nonsense, I interpret this to mean that one's feelings might not be 'appropriate' to present circumstances, — unenlightened

What don't you understand here? Are you saying that there is no notion of appropriate mental states?

Mental states that might be challenged would include, beliefs, emotional reactions, false memories and memories per se, values, prejudices, constructs and theories and so on.

For what it's worth I'd point out that when it comes to emotions and life in general, the Buddhist middle path notion seems apt.

One must strike a balance between extremes - according to the Buddha it's the happiest place to be. — TheMadFool

I like the sound of this and I'll look into it thanks.

The extremes seem like popular places. I am agnostic about a lot of things but I don't feel there is much of this perspective in the media. I think emotions are utilised to sway opinion and as a form of censorship in a divisive way.... Or maybe emotions are just aroused and run out of control.

What I don't understand is how people can claim people are going to hell but not be (drastically) emotionally affected by this thought. It makes me question how committed they actually are to this claim. And why do people think hell is a reasonable proposition in the first place?

I said to my parents after I left the church I grew up in something like, if you think people are going to hell why aren't you out in the streets yelling at people and knocking frantically at doors (rather than just repeating useless religious rituals)?

There is evidence for depressive realism where moderately depressed people make better judgements than happy people. So it seems like happiness is more irrational than negative emotions. Also anger and sadness can cause social change for the better such as outrage against slavery etc.

I feel that there must be some rational link between some emotions and judgements. Otherwise our values seem to stem from brute feelings rather than reason. And reason alone does not tell us what we ought to do.

If you have 7 apples and 3 friends, mathematically you know they can't be shared equally but the discrepancy will be no big deal. But I think merely pointing out numerically based inequalities doesn't have emotional force. And this is probably why single cases of suffering can have a bigger effect than mass suffering on the public conscience. It is like people values become to abstract and detached from real peoples lived experience just by hearing figures.

Philosophy is a twisted mess so far as emotion is concerned. — TheMadFool

Yes. I feel the analysis of emotions has been confusing and lacking in definitions.

There is increasing evidence that emotions are necessary for rationality and motivation which I think is problematic for notions of rationality (as in opposition to emotion). And therefore I think studying emotions is crucial for social and psychological analysis as it makes them key players in dynamics as opposed to being secondary symptoms or instinctual responses to stimuli.

I am very Freudian about emotions and I think they subconsciously and unconsciously motivate people whilst people give different justifications for their behaviour or values.

Emotions are effects on the organism caused by one's environment, actions, or thoughts. — jkop

Fight or flight response is a widely cited paradigm. Animals seem to function under stress and they have shown that animals in captivity can be no more stressed or even less stressed than animals in the wild.

I am not certain what emotions we can attribute to animals but I think in humans they have become
(unhelpfully? entangled with intelligent (higher) cognitions

I don't think my therapist wants to engage in a philosophical discussion about the nature of emotions and she tries to stop me going down this type of route. It was helpful when she discussed how the amygdala and hippocampus may interact and that these areas can be altered.

I can see how past experiences probably shape current responses (but I haven't seen a brain scan to prove it in me).

CBT seems okay in the case of mildly or wildly irrational beliefs but when it comes to more complex mental states formed over a long period it seems much weaker.

What I am concerned with here is the whole paradigm of mental states being appropriate or inappropriate etc.

For example I grew up being told about hell
and it seems to me that if you believed in a hell and that you or lots of other people could end up there anxiety seems most appropriate (if not terror) but then if you get upset and or have a nervous breakdown you are seen as mad. I am concerned that society itself is chronically dysfunctional but a societal failure to behave emotionally appropriately to beliefs is making vulnerable outsiders carry the burden of anxiety.

Perhaps a better way to look at the 'appropriate' description of an emotion is to interpret it as meaning that an 'inappropriate' emotion is one that it is better not to have, and that it is worth working to eliminate — andrewk

You could just eliminate all negative emotions (I am not opposed to that).

The problem is however that emotions seem to tell us what is likely to be right or wrong. So it would be like eliminating pain in the way congenital pain defect does. But people with pain defect are likely to seriously injure themselves and die younger because they can't tell what harm they are doing to their bodies.


Maybe anxiety and other negative emotions are telling us something really is wrong and the change might need happen somewhere else other than in the individual.

The conundrum is how we know if something is appropriate if we rely on emotions for motivation but they do not lawfully link with events.

In terms of the subjective value of exam results. Someone's own network of experiences,values and beliefs can make their emotional response coherent when objectively it doesn't appear that way. There are so many experiences as memories and beliefs an individual can have to navigate and not just what is immediately happening. (What influence should past experiences have on emotions?)

I very likely have Aspergers and that is associated with worrying and catastrophizing and fixating etc. (Awaiting assessment but score highly and have lot of the traits)

However at the same time I was bullied badly in childhood and brought up in a hell and damnation religion.

So I had very real reasons to feel anxious in childhood (and the religion was very black and white). Part of my problem with the religion is that I tried to (or had to) take it seriously so if someone said "Billions of people are going to to hell" I took that seriously and that is part of the reason I left because people in the church made all these grotesque statements but did not respond appropriately.

The problem I have an adult is just feeling a general anxiety or dread that I think comes from childhood.

Having had such a long experience of abuse and being exposed to religious fanaticism etc is real evidence these things exist even if they are not happening now. So the fear seems rational. How can i alter or delete memories I wonder.

Sure, but the issue is that it seems like language can describe most of the world in scientific terms — Marchesk

I think science is explaining and theorising about the world not describing it. We don't need a description for what is already a vivid experience.

I think the problem for science is explaining consciousness. When you have reasonable scientific and causal explanations/theories then you can manipulate experiences or entities.

I think that if we had an explanation or causal theory for consciousness then a lot of other things would be enlightened such as in psychology, the nature of colour and qualia in general and some issues in physics. A lack of conciousness is why Knut Nordby and Mary can't see Red. So what does consciousness reveal or add to phenomena? If we had a dogs sense of smell would we develop new theories?

In some sense theory is a tool for expanding consciousness.

First, are you saying that the Swampman scenario is nomologically impossible, or just less probable than something else? — SophistiCat

I am saying that the scenario is both implausible and impossible. The implausibility comes from the violation of laws of entropy by this incredibly implausible arrangement of matter that would require massive coincidences. The impossibility comes from the idea of two things being identical.

It seems that things can only be identical with themselves.

I don't see how I could draw any conclusions from a thought experiment when I couldn't imagine the proposed scenario. I think the Chinese room argument suffers from this also to a lesser extent because complex task required of the interlocutor.

But I think the China brain argument is plausible because it is simply showing how we wouldn't expect a country to be conscious whatever physical state it got into.

So yes, I suppose I am advocating total simplicity in thought experiments. (But even then there are endless quibbles)

Other quasi thought experiments like The Trolley problem I think suffer from lack of ecological validity. I think you should assess real life reactions (Like Nordby's) over intuitions.

I don't think the Mary's room argument ascertains that there are non physical facts because I think it is based on an incoherent view of language and how language might represent the world. Science uses symbols that refer to concepts so it is unlikely to represent experience identically.

I think what the Thought Experiment inadvertently shows and what Jackson didn't seem to intend is our primary reliance on consciousness. The thought experiment seems to want to ask how you can represent experience without having experience. I don't see how a description of anything could usurp experience. The Experiment has a similar problem to the Twin earth one in pushing the idea that language must some how refer directly to essences.