Pleasure and Joy

[genkaus]

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

Then you should look up the example of Craniopagus twins.

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.

Isn't that what we are disputing right here? Whether the content of experience is mediated by the brain or generated by 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.

Its not that surprising when you think about it. Even in a simple computer application, multiple processes are going on in parallel under the surface, but on the user end, they appear quite unified.

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?

That's where neuroscience comes in. We don' know yet that there isn't a specific section of brain responsible for this assembly. In fact, current studies suggest there may not be a single unifying principle. Different sections of brains may be responsible for joining different data-streams and yet other sections for joining those combined streams and so on and on.

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Except Fido is a dog.

That's because my statement "being human is necessary to run" is provable incorrect. That is not the case with experience.

The proposition that certain behaviors require sentience is an unsupported claim anyway.

Then how do you address the 14 pages worth of support I've provided for it?