Pleasure and Joy

[genkaus]

Then you don't know what a circle is.

I do know - and this isn't one.

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

Except you ignored the very next sentence where show exactly what makes it provable, proven and true.

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

A substitution which makes all the difference in the world and a substitution which is justified, given the existence of evidence.

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.

Fine, I'll repeat the same argument once again - we don't need direct access to the property of subjective experience. Once again, we don't need direct access to the property of subjective experience. We do have an objective access to it - the observation of its consequences. Not 'seeing' subjective experience is not a roadblock to concluding its existence.

As for your accusation of fairies - if we observe a specific brain function going on, we observe that that brain function results in specific behavior and physiological results and and we know beforehand that those results are caused by experience - then the logical conclusion is that that brain function is experience. No fairies involved.

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.

Within this analogy - the Christian has given proof. He has given evidence to support the claim that his god actually exists rather than just seeming to exist. Now its up to you to disprove.

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.

That's where you are wrong - by your own admission, there is always atleast one person who can see or interact with experience - the doing the experiencing. Any 'mapping' I do starts with observing my own experience and mapping it to my own behavior.

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

On the contrary, I've made the distinction very clear. The behavioral and physiological indicators are consequences of experience occurring. Did you miss the part where I said it before?

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Thank you for answering the question. Your answer helps me address your theory more directly. In order to be causally relevant the subjective experience must fall within the causal chain as follows:

brain-state ---> feeling ---> behaviour.

But that is not what you propose, which is this:

brain-state/feeling ---> behaviour

For any given instance of consciousness, you have a third-party observable property, a brain-state for example, causing another third-party observable behaviour. But you also have a second property, the first-person subjective feelings associated with the brain-state also causing the observable behaviour. Your theory makes two causes, one subjective and one objective, responsible for one effect.

You have one thing, an instance of consciousness. It has two properties. The first is a physical brain-state. The second property is feeling. Which property is necessary and which is accidental? You must choose.

Here's where you go wrong - there is, in fact, just one cause. With reference to that instance of consciousness, both properties are necessary. The problem here is that you cannot intuitively see them as the same thing - which is why you insist on treating them as two separate objects. They are, in fact, not separate.

For example, suppose I send a document to the printer, resulting in the action of it being printed. Now you say that there are two possibilities. The existence of document is a necessary property, there being a set of electronic signals is incidental. Or the existence of signals is necessary and there being a document is incidental. And I must choose which is the case. However, the fact is, without that document, there wouldn't be
those electronic signals and without those electronic signals there wouldn't be a document - they are one and the same thing. That we can conceptually regard them as separate entities does not change the fact.

Similarly, here, the feeling is the brain-state. Which is why, both statements are simultaneously true, whereas any choice would require one of them to be false.