(January 23, 2023 at 9:44 am)Fake Messiah Wrote:(January 23, 2023 at 7:08 am)GrandizerII Wrote: Qualia isn't the only concept that suffers from this problem. Try defining "intelligence" in a way that perfectly captures it, and in a way that is universally agreed upon by relevant experts. Or "love". Or "energy".
We know there is "something" about which we are trying to come up with adequate descriptions, but there is nevertheless a struggle to do so. And it's not just philosophers who struggle with this.
We do know that love, hate, hunger and other feelings are dependent for their existence on brains: human brains, and the brains of other animal species, such as chimpanzees, dogs and whales, too.
Rocks don’t feel love, joy or jealousy, and mountains do not love. These emotions are intensely real to those who experience them, but they didn’t exist before brains did.
So in order to have emotions one has to have matter and more precisely a brain.
It is possible that emotions like these – and perhaps other emotions that we can’t begin to dream of – could exist on other planets, but only if those planets also contain brains – or something equivalent to brains.
Energy is also a state of the matter but people do get confused sometimes. For example, in one episode of ST Voyager, the ship's hologram says that he is made of pure energy, but he is not because he is made of chips and other computer parts and eats whatever the computer uses to get its energy, it is only projected into space but that doesn't make it immaterial.
^This. The idea that there is some sort of a hypothetical ‘veil’ between my experiences and my perception of them doesn’t strike me as tenable.
Boru
‘I can’t be having with this.’ - Esmeralda Weatherwax
