RE: 3 Questions For Believers (A work in progress.)
June 15, 2014 at 10:17 pm
(This post was last modified: June 15, 2014 at 10:17 pm by Jackalope.)
(June 15, 2014 at 10:10 pm)Irrational Wrote:(June 15, 2014 at 9:25 pm)Cthulhu Dreaming Wrote: How does that distinguish him from a sophisticated automaton that emulates consciousness, but does not possess it. See http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philosophical_zombie
Before you argue that such things do not exist, how would you determine this empirically?
Maybe you're looking at "empirically" differently.
Do you agree that determining anything empirically is a matter of observing with our senses in addition to confirming the observation repeatedly and in various ways? And making the proper inferences as a result of what has been continually observed?
Based on what I mean by "empirical", I can determine human beings experience pain when they tell me that they experience certain feelings that make them feel some suffering as a result of being struck hard by something or whatever. As it can be (and has been) observed that human beings experience these feelings, then that's the empirical evidence right there.
No, we are on the same page as to what empiricism is.
Regarding your example - you can determine that other people react to stimuli externally similarly to how you do. Can you do so for the underlying qualia, the subjective experience of stimuli?
I happen to agree that it's useful to assume that we do, but not that what we detect with our senses necessarily represents *all there is in reality*. I ask again, if it wasn't, if there were some phenomena not detectible by human senses, how could we possibly know, *using our senses*.
