(September 28, 2015 at 7:43 am)emjay Wrote:(September 26, 2015 at 10:14 pm)bennyboy Wrote: I see physicalism as essentially exclusive, and idealism as essentially inclusive, and that's why the difference is important. "Show me the evidence or stfu" with regards to issues of mind, or philosophical issues like those of morality or of beauty, ignores an important facet of human experience-- that not all experiences are sharable or reproducible. To idealism, this is nothing at all: some ideas are sharable, some are personal, and so long as we agree which ideas those are, we're peachy.
Hi Benny. I was wondering if you could clarify something for me about your position? Here you talk about issues of morality and beauty and sharable and reproducible. Is it your position that certain aspects of conscious experience, like the experience of beauty, are not hypothetically reproducible... or have I got the wrong end of the stick? In other words if you hypothetically made an exact copy of a brain in a particular state of processing, right down to the quantum level, that it would not reproduce certain conscious experiences such as beauty? This being regardless of whether it's a materialistic reality or one that acts like it is.
I can't comment confidently on how, or if, a cloned brain would feel-- specifically, I don't/can't know if such a construct would be a philosophical zombie. I suspect, as you probably do, that if you could exactly reproduce a brain, it would think it was the original, and would not know that it was a clone; and it would have all the feelings and experiences that the original had.
I didn't really intend to talk hypotheticals, though. I'm talking about the fact that while I can drop a rock, and you will see it drop, I cannot imagine dropping a rock, and have any confidence that you will imagine an identical dropping rock. My contention is that science is really a system for organizing and communicating about shared experiences, and is independent of a physicalist world view. It doesn't matter, for example, if the "real" rock is really in the Matrix; so long as gravity is consistent and can be experimented on, science can be done, and you don't need to take a gnostic position on the real nature of whatever is underlying your observations.
