(January 20, 2019 at 10:11 pm)Gae Bolga Wrote: The same way it uses observations to establish any other thing.
It's a trite and unsatisfactory answer...but it's thoroughly true. If you take issue, you take issue with the entire enterprise of science...-or-...you take special exception to neuroscience for reasons you don't take exception to in any other science. Your call.
There's a difference. If I'm studying the building of bridges, it's because I want the experience of walking on a bridge and it not falling down. If I'm studying gravity, it's because I want to know why things move toward each other without the application of any other conspicuous actor.
If I'm studying the effects of drugs on the brain, and subsequent experience, then that's fine-- I can ask people to report experiences, do brain scans and so on. I'm perfectly good with that, and have benefited from that kind of science more than once.
But if I want to learn about psychogony, and in particular to know what physical systems do / don't experience subjectively, then I'm in a pickle. You can ask people how they feel when you poke their brain with a pin, and be fairly comfortable with the underlying assumptions about physical reality and the ubiquity of real awareness in other people; but that's not really a scientific inference, it's a pragmatic axiom. I can't ask a complex organic system on the Planet Zolotn, or the google 2100 Real-bot ™, at least not sensibly.
