Pleasure and Joy

[bennyboy]

Given that that brain function is subjective experience, it becomes included in the explanation automatically.

In giving that, you are begging the question automatically.

I admire your full commitment to your world view. Not many people would claim a Radio Shack chess set has actual imagination.

Most people work with the same erroneous assumptions as you do.

That's what the Mormons keep telling me. But I don't believe them, either.

I do not accept the way you define these words. You would presumably say that any device which can react to redness (for example, by stopping at a red light) is experiencing redness. And yet, when I talk about the interchange of photons, some of which represent redness, you do not accept that individual particles are actually experiencing. And when I talk about a galaxy, in which many parts' movement is affected by forces exerted on them by other objects, you do not accept that the galaxy is actually experiencing.

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I'm not the one defining these words. And no, I do not say that a device reacting to red light is necessarily sentient. I've been quite clear with regards to my view on the form and function of experience and why it is a reasonable conclusion at one point and not in another.

In case of the galaxy or individual particles, one single causal chain is going on. It receives input, processes it through preset system, gives specific output. Nothing that can be called 'experience' is present here.

In conscious or sentient beings two causal chains occur. The being receives input, processes it and gives output. And this causal chain itself serves as an input for a parallel one. The other system processes the reception and the processing in another manner and gives another set of output. This second causal chain is what we call 'experience'.

If the output given by the entity is not explicable by the existence of the first causal chain, it indicates the existence of a second one. So, if there is a pre-coded program present in the device that dictates reaction to presence of red light, then existence of the second causal chain is not required and inference of experience is invalid. However, if there isn't such a program present, then that indicates a parallel running program which analyzes process itself, i.e. experience.

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Okay, so let's take the temperature in a room, which is heated by an element which turns on and off. This element has no means by which to achieve this turning on and off-- it relies on the thermostat, which monitors the temperature, and cuts or allows power to go to the element. You are saying the thermostat is experiencing both the room and the state of the element, since it is the "second causal chain."

You're funny!