(March 25, 2018 at 6:09 pm)vulcanlogician Wrote:(March 24, 2018 at 10:06 pm)polymath257 Wrote: 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.
Well, yes, the first person experience isn't discernible to me because their brain isn't my brain. But I would know that they are feeling pain, or in the case of the bat, sonar. I would be able to describe, probably in some detail, *what* they are experiencing. But yes, it is not my brain that is experiencing it all.
But I fail to see why that is such a deep issue to so many people. When my computer gets some information, and processes it, your computer may not get the same information or it may process it slightly differently. That seems, to me, to the sole difference in 'first person' versus 'third person' descriptions.
