RE: 3 Questions For Believers (A work in progress.)
June 16, 2014 at 7:24 pm
(This post was last modified: June 16, 2014 at 7:24 pm by Angrboda.)
(June 15, 2014 at 11:15 pm)Irrational Wrote: If, based on observations of what they tell me, I can infer that they have subjective experiences similar to my own, and other assessors continually agree upon observing themselves what they have to say, then that's an empirical approach to finding out if they are likely to have similar subjective experiences, or "qualia", to me. And especially in the absence of any evidence to the contrary.
Also, concerning brain scans, if the same brain regions light up as my own upon experiencing pain (for example), and we also compared the scans to those corresponding to individuals who report that they don't feel pain, we could come up with fairly decisive conclusion regarding this matter.
Here's a little example. Suppose that when you look at something blue, you experience what I experience when I look at red. However, when you look at red, you experience what I experience when I look at blue. Because the experiences are systematically swapped, you consistently refer to blue as blue, and red as red. Now comes the experiment. How would you demonstrate empirically that your red and blue experiences are different, as opposed to us both having the same color experience when we look at the same color, red or blue. How can you empirically demonstrate one case, experiences swapped, versus the other, both sets of color experiences the same?