RE: Does it make sense to speak of "Universal Consciousness" or "Univer...
June 1, 2014 at 5:41 am
(June 1, 2014 at 4:30 am)pocaracas Wrote:(June 1, 2014 at 2:19 am)bennyboy Wrote: That's a lot of reading. Maybe you can cut to the part where you show what the scientific criteria are for establishing whether a physical structure experiences qualia or not.
Did you see that TED talk I put up earlier?
I'm on my phone, so you're going to have to go back a page or two to find it.
Towards the end of that talk, there's a nice little experiment where an electromagnetic pulse is shown to (on some cases) perturb your decision making process...
I think the brain science is very cool. I think you linked some things about selective brain damage as well, right? With all my philosophical complaints with physicalism as a philosophy, the fact that you can mess with my brain and make interesting things happen to my experience is undeniable.
But my question is how would you determine if a non-Earth-animal physical structure had qualia? How can you even determine if a human really has qualia rather than just behaving like he/she does? With humans, there's always the implicit assumption-- we already believe people to be conscious so we just start seeing what the brain's doing. But how would you go about testing other things?