RE: The Philosophy of Mind: Zombies, "radical emergence" and evidence of non-experiential
April 27, 2018 at 11:45 pm
(April 27, 2018 at 11:20 pm)Hammy Wrote: As if seeming wasn't the most real and knowable thing in the world... and as if all empirical knowledge didn't depend on it...
That's the rub. Literally everything I know or believe I have done so through the agency of mind. The only true brute fact is consciousness. The rest is all derivative. Watching apples drop from trees-- experience. Listening to physics teacher talk about how wave functions that can't be unambiguously defined in either space or time-- experience. Measuring things with a ruler, looking through microscopes, asking people what they smell when you poke their brain with a needle-- all experience.
As soon as you move to the shorthand version: "The professor said X" rather than "What seemed like a professor seemed to say X," then you are already begging the question without knowing it. That's because there are very many frameworks which could provide a seeming-of-things that don't require a material monopoly.
