Pleasure and Joy

[bennyboy]

While there is no such device yet, the experimental premise you've laid out can answer your other question - about the nature of human experience. Now, if there was such a device that could 'connect' your brain to another person's brain, then - if there is any shared experience - then that should establish that experience is a brain function and it is possible for another person's experience to be directly accessible to you, correct?

It would be a step in that direction, particular if you could connect/disconnect to a person at random and experience what they experience.

However, I think even now it's not disputed that the content of experience is mediated by the brain. You'd have to take a strong solipsistic or idealistic position not to accept that drugs affect both experience and behavior. I personally think that we will eventually be able to augment the brain with hardware that interfaces it.

The issue, though, is the ontology of qualia at all, regardless of the physical mechanism underlying it. In the experience, billions of pieces of data are processed in parallel. Some of that processing must be self-referential in the way that you claim "is" experience. However, the various processes of sight and sound are unified into a single complex of experiences, related to each other in an apparent individual agency.

Given that there is no organ of the brain responsible for this assembly, then why does a person have a single conscious stream? Where is that canvas, or agent, or unifying principle that allows ideas to share the same mental space?