Monist vs. Dualist Experiment?

[bennyboy]

Solipsism does not enter the equation here. Within the context of this ANALOGY, your observation of a plane crash is equivalent to direct access to your own qualia. And your inference regarding the event from its images is as much of an agnostic assumption as inferring anyone else's qualia.

The fundamental difference is that in one case, we are mapping the properties of supposedly external objects onto experience, and in the other, we are attempting to map the NATURE of experience onto properties the supposedly external objects. This is an unlike comparison. Qualia as an object (e.g. as we do now when we symbolize it into words and talk about it), and qualia as the subjective representation of properties of objects, are not the same thing.

The philosophical assumption you are unwilling to extend happens to be subjective experience, which constitutes a denial for their capacity to do so.

That's right. And your next point addresses my reason for making that extension.

I don't have an instinctive need to see them as conscious, and there's no pragmatic advantage to doing so. For my life to make sense, I don't have to believe that robots really experience.

That's the most basic mistake one can make in pursuit of knowledge - making assumptions based on need or advantage they provide.

Given an issue that is intrinsically agnostic, one MUST make an arbitrary decision (or arbitrarily refuse to make a decision) about how to view the issue. I cannot know whether other entities actually experience qualia, and nothing I can do changes that fact.

You've often referred to "evidence," to hypotheses and their varying likelihoods. But there's a glaring absence of the words "absolute, undeniable proof." That's because science is intrinsically agnostic, not intrinsically gnostic. It's founded on assumptions which themselves aren't provable, starting with the existence of the physical universe.

Why do we assume the world is real? Because a rock on the head hurts. Because the boredom felt during math class feels very vivid. Because the girl who finally said "yes" provides an experience so rich that I believe it couldn't be a product of the imagination.

So don't be so confident that I'm just assuming on a whim, whereas you distinguish yourself by drawing careful conclusions based on factual evidence. It's all just experience, and the tendency to draw certain inferences is based on how we feel about our experiences, not on the "real" nature of whatever underlies them.

Because the transmutation of energy can itself be seen as a kind of simple data processing.

How?

Every interaction results in a change of state, which affects the subsequent unfolding of further interactions.