(March 22, 2016 at 12:12 pm)bennyboy Wrote:(March 22, 2016 at 8:47 am)little_monkey Wrote: But you have no guarantee that ALL ducks experience exactly the same. One duck might see a piece of bread as delicious; another duck might see less than delicious, almost as disgusting. You have no way of knowing that. So you saying, "by definition you can be guaranteed that a duck experiences", you're just speculating. And without empirical evidence, according to my definition, you have a crackpot theory.
Fair enough. If you want to stipulate that all ducks, which may experience by definition (without actually being known to experience) could experience differently from each other, then I will accept that. This reinforces the idea that even given a particular organism, we cannot know what (or if) it experiences-- which is one of my primary points in this thread.
*** my boldening
But are you really that sure?
For instance, I can point to you to a tree, and say it's a tree, and for the sake of argument, it's the first time you see a tree. Later I can point to you another tree, which you will agree that it is also a tree. Yet, that second tree has a slightly different trunk, the leaves are designed differently, the branches are more drooping than the first tree. Yet, you can agree with me that it's still a tree. Why? Didn't you understand the first time the essence of what constitute a tree, otherwise you would disagree that the second object is also a tree? Isn't it the way we teach our kids? If our experience would be so widely different, we would not be able to communicate, we would not be able to pass on our knowledge to the next generation, our ideas would be stuck in first gear, and we would never be able to unstuck ourselves. Solipsism would rule. Yet, look around, and solipsism doesn't rule.