(March 19, 2016 at 10:18 pm)bennyboy Wrote: I don't think you can say that reporting OF subjective experiences is sufficient to establish that there are in fact subjective mental events. In living as a human, I all the time do this: assume that other people have minds and feelings. However, science based on such a fundamental assumption is going to have problems with circularity. If you say, for example, "I know this subject has experiences because he can describe them," then what happens thirty years from now when your average toaster will be able to tell you how it feels today? What if your computer says "Ouch!" when you start soldering the wrong connection?
I think Rhythm and others would say "If it walks like a duck and quacks like a duck, it's a duck." But I would counter that doesn't guarantee that it experences like a duck-- unless it's actually a duck.
Benny, let me bring you to your attention one more point:
If you examine Popper's concern which at the time he wanted to show was that Freud's theory of the Id was not scientific. It was that a lot of the evidence to justify the Id theory could not be verifiable, because the evidence is not objective. It's in the same sense of, how can you verify you have a soul? So how can anyone verify that one has an Id, an Ego and a Superego? You can't falsify such a claim. ] And so you have an unfalsifiable theory. Subsequently, people in the field of psychiatry dropped Freud's theory like a hot potato.
Now you are similarly proceeding from a position that can never be verifiable. And so even in your argument: "But I would counter that doesn't guarantee that it experiences like a duck-- unless it's actually a duck." By your own arguments you can't make such an argument as you have no way to know what a duck experience. So you're left with hand-waving. Capisce...
