RE: why do we enjoy poetry From the perspective of neuroscience?
January 2, 2019 at 7:29 pm
(This post was last modified: January 2, 2019 at 7:30 pm by Belacqua.)
(January 2, 2019 at 10:51 am)Thoreauvian Wrote:(January 1, 2019 at 8:28 pm)bennyboy Wrote: What you aren't addressing are the important questions:
1) If science is about observation, what observations do you make to establish whether a given system does/doesn't have a subjective experience of reality?
I already answered: a living body with an operational brain and nervous system.
I agree with you that it is perfectly reasonable to assume that other people have interior worlds, just as I do. It would be silly, impractical, and perhaps sociopathic to deny that.
The point of asking the question, though, is to emphasize that science absolutely cannot prove that such a thing is true. This is another way of defining the "hard problem" of consciousness.
Since nobody knows how the electrochemical events of the brain present themselves to the subject as experiences, there is no way for science to prove that in any given case (that is not me) that's what's happening. We can prove that when every normal brain is exposed to a police siren it reacts with activation in the same area. We can prove that the heart rate goes up and the skin gets clammy. We cannot prove that this is the result of personal experience as opposed to automatic programming.
Again, nobody really believes that it is automatic programming. The point is that science can't prove it, because it can't show how interior experiences arise.
