Seeing red

[The Grand Nudger]

No, exactly the opposite.  I think there's a body etc. "out there."  I am that which has experiences, not the apparatus for having them or their objects.

A semantic difference that makes no difference.  You are in your vehicle, your vehicle is out there.  You know that's not going to go far with me.

Since my position is that idealism subsumes the material world view, your constant claim that I'm stealing concepts is pointless.  Chemistry is great-- it presents experiences so consistent that we can expand our ability to manipulate the things around us.  However, in my view, both the chemistry, and the rules underlying it, and the entirety of observable existence are more consistently viewed as a collection of ideas, experiences and principles than as things and their properties.

Your claim is irrational, so I disregard it. That you have stolen concepts is -why- it's irrational (in part)..and I'd hardly consider that pointless.  

It's like you think I live in the Twilight Zone or something.  Fire hurts, I know that and you know that.  But the pain is an experience.  The awareness that there is fire is an experience-- all our interactions with the "outside" environment are 100% experiential.  To live in a reality that is 100% experiential (read: subjective), and then claim that nothing really exists but objects and their properties, is a bizarre disconnect with what we are actually capable of observing.

Sure, I may be a brain in a vat.  As I've already said..while this may be true it's not a very good foundation for knowledge or truth claims.  

I won't imply it.  I'll state it as a position of absolute certainty.

-and that's fine...but it's an irrational criticism.  There is no requirement that either of us possess full knowledge.  

Not co-opted.  Subsumed.

-yet another flourish of semantics that makes no difference.  

The reason an android would make me challenge my assumption is that it is not like me.  Other people seem to be like me in most regards, so I extend to them the likelihood that they are also sentient.

Hold the phone...that's just  a vehicle, remember?  

.An android is not sufficiently similar to me in makeup or origin for me to make that assumption-- EVEN THOUGH they may act exactly identically, and I may not even be able to tell them apart.  Since their mechanism of processing information is different than mine, and since it may be the method of processing which allows for consciousness, then I cannot be satisfied that an android is conscious, even though it very much seems to be.

A more thorough endorsement of my position on the matter could hardly be imagined.  A more explicit example of your special pleading could not be asked for. Just one breath ago, you were telling me about other people seeming to be like you. Well, an android that seems to be conscious, like you...satisfies -that- criteria...and there's no sense in pointing at the differences in the vehicle given your previous comments.

I don't know what a soul is, but if it is defined as "that which allows matter to be conscious," without any religious connotations, then it necessarily exists.  You will not allow this open a definition, however, so you'll have to say what the word means, and why you think I think you have one.

It's just a name I've given the humonculus you feel confident that I possess, and that an android does not. The immaterial "me" inside the vehicle of my body.  Soul seems to fit, don't you think? I don't know why the religious connotations would bother you, you decided to describe your "mind" in a manner indistinguishable from their "souls".