= 27d567bc2d48d9f40e9ccc20ea370b15)
Peterdjones comments on ESR's New Take on Qualia - Less Wrong
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
= 783df68a0f980790206b9ea87794c5b6)
Loading…= b715d02e85f7b3b4ae65ca3d3e450868)
Subscribe to RSS Feed
Powered by Reddit
= f037147d6e6c911a85753b9abdedda8d)
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
Comments (51)
That doesn't explain why qualia are incommunciable, since others stuff that happens in brains is communicale. We expect Mary to understand everything except qualia.
They are incommunicable because you cannot occupy any arbitrary brainstate you want to. See the ability hypothesis.
To repeat my point: that doens't explain why other metnal content is communicable.
Other mental content is expressible propositionally, whereas to duplicate someone's qualia you have to literally duplicate their brainstate (or at least the functional equivalent of their brainstate).
When I say "Greece is in Europe" I am making a propositional claim that is relatively independent of the precise details of how my brain represents that belief, versus how your brain does. Maybe I am picturing a map, while you are remembering Greece's EU membership. For the purposes of communicating that proposition, nobody cares about what your neural activity looks like when you think about Greece being in Europe. The description is higher level: many brainstates map to a single belief state. This is what makes it communicable.
To duplicate something, you of course have to duplicate it. That isn't really the point. What you are tacitly assuming is that qualia cannot be communicated, know or understood without duplication. ie, there is something special about them in that regard. That is how that approach fails as a dissolution. Rather than showing there is nothing special about qualia, it assumes there is something special.
I don't know about yours, but my qualia don't look like neural activity.
(blink) Can you clarify how you can know something like this about peterdjones' qualia and not know it about simplicio's? That is, what evidence do you have for the former that isn't equally evidence for the latter?
Other mental content is communicable because it's a lot simpler. All of the data of an entire human brain state, even considering only a snapshot taken at one instant in time, is many orders of magnitude of quantity/complexity beyond what the conscious mind is capable of considering and understanding.
Is there independent evidence for that?