Pleasure and Joy

[bennyboy]

The sufficient explanation you refer to is experience. The brain mechanism is not an explanation for the behavior, it is an explanation for experience.

You've said that experience IS brain function, and now you say that brain function explains experience. So you can say that brain function explains itself, or that experience explains itself.

To use your own analogy, when I observe light moving in an odd manner I posit the existence of something that I cannot perceive and I call it a black-hole. Then I go on to examine the nature of the back-hole and, upon investigation, find that it is made of superdense matter. Even if my investigation had instead revealed that the black-hole is made of fairy-dust, the fact of black-hole's existence would not have changed. Either way, I wouldn't be assuming anything.

You would be if you posited properties to the black hole which nobody can observe, and which are not required to explain the observations which cause you to infer its existence in the first place.

Similarly, I see specific human behavior being caused by something and I call that thing 'experience'. The added advantage here is that I have knowledge of its existence due to my own capacity to experience. And upon investigation of what this experience is, I find it to be a specific brain-mechanism. If I had instead found a soul, I'd have said, soul is the explanation for experience. But instead, I find that brain-mechanism is the explanation.

lol even you have to put quotes around it. I look forward to seeing the brain scans which you did of yourself, which you've also found in other humans. Frankly, I did not know you had access to any of that kid of equipment.

If conclusions drawn from careful consideration of physical facts cannot be regarded as knowledge, then there can be no such thing as scientific knowledge.

I'm saying that your conclusions are NOT drawn from careful consideration of physical facts. You did NOT infer the existence of awareness, in yourself or anyone else, based on behavior or brain function. You already believe that others actually experience.

The problem is that all those physical facts upon which you claim to draw work fine without positing any kind of actual experience. You are inferring properties that aren't required, only because you might as well since you feel you "know" the truth already.

So, by your standard, we all are necessarily agnostic about all of reality. We don't know that Earth is round -we believe it is. We don't know that dinosaurs existed - we believe they did. We don't know that law of gravity works - we believe it does. And by the same standard, we don't know that we don't know - we believe that we don't know. Is this your position? Because it is self-refuting.

You can claim gnosticism about idea which share the same context, which is determined by perspective and the set of assumptions one makes.

So I can know for sure that there's milk in my fridge. I don't need to worry that maybe I'm in the Matrix, and the milk isn't real, because I'm not making assertions about the existential reality of the milk-- only that if I open the fridge, there it is to be experienced visually.

In a video game, I can know for sure that if I get too close to a certain monster, it will kill me. If someone else asks "Are you sure?" I'll say I know for sure. In the context of that video game, it's a fact that that monster will kill me 100% of the time. Anyone who talks to me is operating in the same context that I am: no sensible person will say, "La la la I'm not really dead I'm in my Mom's basement eating Doritos." This fails, because he's abandoning the context.

Similarly, if someone gets knocked out, I can snap my fingers in front of his face until he blinks and say, "He's finally conscious again, because he's experiencing my finger snaps." Since I'm operating in a context defined by accepting the ideas both of the reality of the physical universe and of experience in other humans, then the only criterion of experience is his behavior. He's as conscious as anyone else is, and since I'm already assuming (even implicitly) that other humans can be conscious, there's no conflict there.

This is where you are. You've chosen your set of assumptions, and are fully immersed in the gnostic reality of the context which is defined by them. The problem is that you don't accept that they are assumptions-- you think they are based on evidence of a context external to assumptions. But they aren't.