(March 24, 2018 at 10:06 pm)polymath257 Wrote:(March 24, 2018 at 9:21 pm)bennyboy Wrote: If pragmatism is truth, then you're right. But it isn't, and you're not.
I can definitely define what qualia is [sic]. It's the experience of what things are like, including the existence of the self. That you can't hit it with a hammer and therefore want to discard it from any intellectual consideration is your problem, not a problem with philosophy.
And how is a quale NOT a form of information processing? How is it any different than any other sensory input?
So, does a thermometer 'experience' the temperature? Why or why not?
Thomas Nagel asks the question "What is it like to be a bat?"
A scientist may fully understand a bat's physiology and fully understand how it uses sonar to navigate its nocturnal environment but something is left unexplained. There is a certain sensation and experience that the bat has when it uses sonar--the qualia involved.
What about the sensation of pain? You might understand every neural pathway activated by a pin prick to the finger. Even if you had privilege to view every change in someone's brain states when his/her finger is being pricked with a pin, the first-person experience of the pin prick (pain) would not be discernible to you.
As John Searle puts it, conscious experience is causally reducible but not ontologically reducible to brain states.
