Pleasure and Joy

[bennyboy]

No, the problem is that you are not only working with with limited facts, you are also unwilling to consider any additional facts available.

This is not a semantic game. Your direct access to your own subjective awareness tells you nothing about the fundamental nature of experience itself. The only thing that you can know from just that direct access is that you have subject awareness. That you are capable of experience. Just from that single fact, you cannot determine the existence/non-existence of soul, you cannot determine if someone or something else is also subjectively aware and you cannot determine whether brain function is relevant to the experience. Once again, because it bears repetition, you cannot conclude anything on any of those issues simply based on the fact of your own experience.

Have I stated otherwise? I fully agree, since I've said that you cannot use experience to validate ideas about the ultimate nature of experience.

But fortunately, our repository of facts is not limited to that. And this is why it is not a semantic game. What you refer to as "your rich subjective awareness" or your "actual experience" is, in fact, a specific form of data-processing.

Only in the way that Casablanca is a reel of celluloid with light shining through it, and nothing more.

The philosophical reality of who you are is that you are a complex information processing system within which one specific form of information-processing is labelled "experience". That you think this makes you less special is irrelevant.

Your appeal to emotion on my behalf is noted and discarded. I'm not arguing that Cyberboy's experience belittles my own. I'm arguing that since I know that at least one human (me) actually experiences, and since I do not have access to Cyberboy's experience (or lack thereof), I'm willing to assume that other humans actually experience, but not that Cyberboy does, regardless of how it behaves.

You are making the same mistake over and over again. That other humans are capable of experience is not only knowable, it is known. It is known because direct access to experience is not required to establish the knowledge of its existence. It is known because all the lines of evidence - physiological, neurological and behavioral - point to its existence.

And you are ignoring the same refutation over and over again: that you are conflating subjective (i.e. actual) experience with physicals markers that SEEM to indicate experience, but can never be proven to do so.

Your ignorance is not a justification for universal ignorance. Your inability to know it does not place a limitation on anyone else's ability to know. Others would know that Cyberboy has the ability to actually experience because they know that certain behaviors are the result of subjective awareness and evidence of that behavior is prima-facie evidence of existence of experience. Your rejection of this knowledge is a positive assertion and bears the burden of proof.

That's goofy. That's like saying that the rejection of someone's "knowledge" of God is a positive assertion and bears the burden of proof. You are making assertions about the nature of experience, and I'm saying you haven't proven those assertions to be more than either assumptions or meaning-changing conflations-- just as you would do if a Christian tried to say, "Everything that exists is the Body of God, therefore I CAN show you God in the lab." You'd say that's a goofy definition of God, and refuse to accept his "evidence" as valid. And that's exactly what I'm saying to you.

Nope, I'm taking a mechanism and discovering that the way it works is precisely how the mind-existent concept of imagination works and thus concluding that the mechanism has imagination.

Except that "processing data" is itself another mind-existent word: really, what you have is a bunch of particles interchanging energy. The solar system does this-- so by your definition, the solar system has imagination. As does the sun. As does the hair on my chinny chin chin. OR you are going to say, "No. I'm talking about super-duper SPECIAL data processing, not the infinite (and super-complex) exchanges of energy happening all throughout the universe.