Pleasure and Joy

[genkaus]

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).

That would just be the preliminary stage. Right now, there is so much activity going on in a brain that identifying a specific experiential mechanism from the lot is difficult. The verbal testimony of experience is required to narrow it down, but is not sufficient proof of it.

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.

Actually, I never claimed that wherever there is a tail there is a dog. Put in other words I never claimed that experience is only possible with human minds.

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.

We do - as a matter of fact. A dog can't wag his tail if he does not have one.

Again, you are correlating behaviors with brain function, not the actual mental experience.

No, I'm saying experience is a brain function. Therefore, I'm correlating behavior to both brain function and experience at the same time.

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.

When you say that dinosaurs existed, what you are actually saying is that existence of fossils suggest existence of dinosaurs - at no point do you have access to the existential reality/unreality of dinosaurs.

When you say that black-holes exist, what you are actually saying is that motion of certain astronomical bodies suggest its existence - at no point do you have access to the existential reality/unreality of their existence.

When you say that global warming occurs, what you are actually saying is that scientists have reported its occurrence - at no point do you have access to its existential reality.

When you say that the accused committed a crime what you are actually saying is that evidence and eye-witness testimony suggest that he committed the crime - at no point do you have access to the existential reality/unreality of the crime itself.

As I've said before - direct perceptual access to something is not required to establish its existence.

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Obviously if you are focused over cause and effects without caring the origin of cause, you’ll have chances to get disappointments with the discourse about mysticism in love. Indeed love is a generalized concept. Many eminent intellectuals like Plato, Aristotle, J. Proust, Spinoza, Kant, etc. have already said much about love.

However, the locus of love shifts dramatically if it is studied under the hood of self-consciousness. In this perspective, it becomes phenomenal experience. Phenomenal experiences have been argued to be non-physical which science can’t dissect and in this sense love contains evidence of mysticism.

Since phenomenological experiences haven't been established as non-physical, nor has it been established that anything non-physical would be beyond scientific inquiry - I'd say that science can dissect and examine love. And by the way, "evidence of mysticism" is a contradiction in terms.