(January 18, 2016 at 1:37 am)ChadWooters Wrote:(January 15, 2016 at 3:52 pm)Thumpalumpacus Wrote: What about non-reality is knowable? And how do you know that?
I feel sorry for anyone who confuses beliefs and knowledge. That way lies illusion and self-deception.
And that is not knowledge, it's belief and emotion.
Are you saying that psychological facts don't count? (Mary's Room, Jackson).
The Mary's room' thought experiment doesn't really disprove physicalism though. The study designer claims that in her black and white room, with her black and white tv, Mary learns "all the physical information there is" to know about how humans see color. But, Mary was -intentionally- deprived of the PHYSICAL experience of seeing color! If her tools of observation are withheld, and she is unable to physically experience color, how can we say she has acquired "all the information there is"? To me, it's not that she learned something new upon leaving the room and experiencing the color red, it's just that her knowledge base was incomplete from the start. I mean, isn't observation step one in the scientific method?
Yes, experience is one step in the information gathering process, and it IS a facet of knowledge acquisition, but my point in the OP was that experience -alone- can never be equal to knowledge. Suppose it went the other way around; if Mary (like many of us) could see colors just fine, but never learned any of the neurophysiological science behind -how- she sees them. What is the practical significance of her experience of color to anyone but her? I can't even say for sure that red looks the same to everyone else as it does to me.
Nay_Sayer: “Nothing is impossible if you dream big enough, or in this case, nothing is impossible if you use a barrel of KY Jelly and a miniature horse.”
Wiser words were never spoken.
Wiser words were never spoken.
