Peterdjones comments on ESR's New Take on Qualia - Less Wrong

3 Post author: billswift 21 August 2009 09:26AM

You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.

Comments (51)

You are viewing a single comment's thread. Show more comments above.

Comment author: Peterdjones 03 March 2013 02:45:07PM 1 point [-]

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).

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.

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).

I don't know about yours, but my qualia don't look like neural activity.

Comment author: TheOtherDave 03 March 2013 04:21:03PM 0 points [-]

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?