What's the point of philosophy any more?

[bennyboy]

How do you know that you do? 

That's the trouble with the crutch of a conceptual black hole..it swallows everything.  If you can answer the question of whether or not you experience, and how you know it..then you can answer the question of whether or not others experience..and how you know it...and you can answer the question of whether or not a thermometer experiences..and how you know it.

It is, after all, a singular question.  No different than asking whether or not it's raining in three different cities.  You may live in one, be familiar with the other, and never have visited the third, but was that the question?  Your knowledge of self is no less subjective than your knowledge of others, or your knowledge of thermometers.  It's a meaningless subjectivity, imo..but if you insist on it being a problem in any city it's just as much a problem in your own.  Just as your pragmatic assumptions are a problem if Matthildas are.  You couldn't even establish that -you- aren't a thermometer..in the manner you've tried to argue the subject with others.  

Is that a problem?

Yeah, maybe.  That's why I talk about ideas having scope, defined by the assumptions necessary to maintain them.

I can't prove that my wife has a sentient existence; if she doesn't, then saying she looks fat in her new jeans doesn't really matter much.  But in the context set by the idea that she IS a sentient creature with feelings, then that would be contra-indicated.

As for answering for myself and others, I respectfully disagree.  That's because I use different definitions for my subjective experiences than I do for their object.  My experience of hot chocolate, for example, is not hot chocolate.  My experience of music is not the music itself.

As for knowledge of the self: yeah, I'd agree.  As soon as you go beyond the basic fact of existence (whatever-it-is), you are conceptualizing an object; why would that be different than any others?

And no-- it's never a problem.  Philosophy is kind of the art of navigating that kind of stuff.