(September 28, 2015 at 11:58 am)bennyboy Wrote:(September 28, 2015 at 7:43 am)emjay Wrote: 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.
I wasn't really wanting to talk hypotheticals either. I've finally managed to get to the end of the thread reading every post carefully and slowly so I think I have a fairly good understanding of everyone's position, but I did think that what we all had in common was the belief that the brain in a particular state directly correlates with a certain experience... so that even if the world was 'monist idealist' it would still appear to be correlated in exactly the same way even if there was no 'real' material behind it. I.e. if the monist idealist world is functionally identical to the material world then science would produce the same findings whichever it was. So with that in mind I just wanted to check whether you believed that the brain accounted, or appeared to account for all aspects of consciousness and conscious experience. As it stands I'm torn between yours, AKD's, and Rhythm's positions but I did think we all had that one thing in common and just needed to check.
