RE: Pleasure and Joy
August 31, 2013 at 4:18 am
(This post was last modified: August 31, 2013 at 4:18 am by bennyboy.)
(August 31, 2013 at 12:43 am)genkaus Wrote: The difference between an elaborate data-processing and actual experience is simple - experience is data-processing of that data-processing. For example, if you prick a person's toe he twitches - the data of the pin-prick is received by the pain receptors and processed to provide a response of twitching. If the person is conscious at the time, he'd be aware of this whole process taking place and this awareness is the sensation of pain. In other words experience. Another example - when a light is shined on your eyes, your pupils contract. This is an unconscious process that does not require any actual experience on your part. The light falls - the brain processes this - and sends out the signal for pupils to contract. But, your brain also becomes aware of the reception of this information and that is experience. And this experience can result in additional responses like blinking, squinting or shielding your eyes.Hmmm. . . and how will you go about making that association between experience? By asking people what they're experiencing, and monitoring their brain. So you've proven that all people who report that they are actually experiencing have certain kinds of brain function (or more generally, that they are doing certain kinds of data processing). But you're just proving that all dogs have tails. Now you have the task of proving that wherever there's a tail, there's necessarily a dog.
So, while one may not be directly able to observe the existence of someone else's experience, we can certainly infer - nay, prove - its existence by identifying the mechanisms required for that experience and establishing that they are functional.
Actually, you're not quite proving that all dogs have tails, because we don't have to infer the existence of tails from any aspect of the dogs' behavior.
Quote:Its not begging the question if the hypothesis is both testable and falsifiable. If your dualist hypothesis was correct then any alteration in the experience itself by altering the brain chemistry would've been impossible. That was the first indicator that in all likelihood, even experience is a specific function of the brain.Again, you are correlating behaviors with brain function, not the actual mental experience. So when you say, "All conscious people have brain function X," what you're really saying is, all people who (report their experiences/move their eyes/show emotion) have brain function X. At no point do you have access to the existential reality/unreality of their subjective experience.