Pleasure and Joy

[bennyboy]

I'm saying that you can use experience to validate ideas about the ultimate nature of experience.

Then you don't know what a circle is.

And I'm saying that the limitation of your knowledge does not make that knowledge impossible. Unlike you, we do not assume that other humans have experience - we know.

Just as Christians "know" that God exists but that doesn't make it proven, provable, or true. Truthiness is not truth.

The behavioral indicators (how you act and what you say) are consequences of experience occurring. Certain physiological indicators (increased heart-beat, rush of adrenaline) are consequences of experience occurring. This I know because I perceive these consequences occurring within myself. Which is why I know that they don't simply seem to indicate experience - they do indicate experience. Which is why when I see them in others, I conclude that they too are capable of experience.

That's exactly what I said, except you are replacing the words "willing to assume" with "know."

The neurological indicators are experience. The same way that electronic signals are software. There is no conflation - we are just examining the same phenomenon at different levels.

Sure, there's a conflation. There's a person's brain function, which we can see, and their subjective experience, which we cannot. Conflating what can be seen with what cannot is an act of summoning fairies. EVEN IF there is a perfect 1:1 correlation between the properties of NT flow, electrical flow, etc. with a person's actual experience, they are at best different properties of those functions-- and the simple fact is that we don't have objective access to the property of subjective experience.

[re theistic claims] If that person has provided rational, testable and falsifiable justification for that knowledge, then yes, it's [sic] rejection would be a positive assertion and bear the burden of proof.

Yeah no. If a Christian wants to make an existential claim, he has to prove that God actually exists, rather than seeming to him to exist. At no point in this process does anyone else have to prove anything.

Except for the little fact that I have proven my assertion to be more than assumptions or meaning-changing conflations. My explanation of experience is compatible with its standard definition. And that would be the criteria for judging conflation - not your vague, inexplicable redefinition. And my assertions have been supported by evidence - evidence that complies with the accepted scientific standard. Unlike this hypothetical Christian, I'm not redefining, conflating or starting with assumptions. Which is why your counter-argument is invalid.

A Christian takes something nobody can see or interact with (God), maps it to other properties (like feelings or circumstantial events), conflates them, and feels confident in claiming that God is real. You take something nobody can see or interact with (someone else's actual experience), map it to other properties (behaviors / organ function), conflate them, and feel confident in claiming that actual experience is real.

And that is my definition of conflation with regard to this thread: synonymizing that which can be directly observed which that which cannot.