What's the point of philosophy any more?

[bennyboy]

The consistent use of present tense language with regards to experience is inconsistent with any mechanical or functional reality in which it is a post process data summary.  Experience, in those systems, isn;t something that -is- happening.  That you -are- experiencing.  

In this way that time itself conspires against qualia.

I had a pretty interesting day in the hospital, once about a month ago, and then again about a week ago.  I went in for a gastro endoscopy, and they gave me some kind of sleep drug.  But before the procedure, the doctor told me I'd be able to respond to verbal commands and to move around a little bit.

The idea of that recalled things I heard about anesthetics: that in some cases, a person may live through an entire world of suffering, but is just paralyzed.  Then, when they wake up, they have selective amnesia, meaning they are completely unaware of the hell they may have (in theory) just lived through.  Now, this may be an urban legend, but it gave me food for thought.

Anyway, back to my procedure.  What I actually experienced was this: nothing.  Then, a flurry of sensation in my throat, like a big freaking dildo was going in and out of it about four times.  Then, I opened my eyes and was fully awake.  What I THINK happened was that the drug did something to my sense of time, and I experienced the entire procedure in what was about 5 seconds in subjective time.  Basically, I was in fact conscious in a scientific sense, but I'm not sure in what sense I was or wasn't conscious in an experiential sense.  It's totally possible that I experienced the whole thing, and just had a false sense of time as a memory after the fact (like they say we do in car crashes).

It made me wonder about philosophical zombies.  Maybe I was one.  Maybe my grandmother, who just passed but lived about 15 years with increasing dementia, didn't actually experience ANYTHING even though she seemed to, because her short-term memory was so rotted that she couldn't have had the kind of sense of time that I was just talking about.

Spooky stuff, tbh.

---

Electricity, though. . . that is something very interesting indeed.  We can catalogue massive amounts of data around and near it.  But the thing itself-- that is more elusive than ever before.

-and yet no less discernible or detectable.  Voltmeters work.  A painometer would be no different.  

I don't think we use a voltmeter to verify a philosophical position, though.

It is my belief that science, good hard science, has reached a point where it's much better at telling us what reality ISN'T than what it IS, n'est-ce pas?  I can say that to a very large degree my ideas about mind and the Universe are closely connected to my first inquiries into QM maybe 30 or so years ago, and that newer science seems to be taking us farther and farther into a wilderness of uncertainty.

That may be, maybe we live in a fundamentally uncertain universe, at least on some level, even.  The truth of this..though, wouldn't and doesn't endanger the truth of things on what you referred to as "the macro level".  Assuming fundamental uncertainty or randomness or even lack of cause at the smallest level of organization, at larger levels...many possibilities or probabilities reduce and reduce and reduce to the point of improbability or impossibility.  Too many blocked roads..as it were, and the remaining open paths describe the distribution of the states of affairs that we then see.

To people like Matthilda, I'd say this. In a fundamentally uncertain universe, what is knowledge? We don't know what an electron or a photon really are, and yet. . . there's no room for philosophy?