loqi comments on Being Wrong about Your Own Subjective Experience - Less Wrong

37 Post author: lukeprog 24 April 2011 08:24PM

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Comment author: Amanojack 25 April 2011 04:41:20AM *  12 points [-]

Some neat tidbits about our ability to recall our conscious experience and about how difficult it is to hold a passing thought in memory long enough to analyze it, but it is a total strawman of Hume's (and many others') position that "I cannot be wrong about my subjective experience."

What you've done here is equivocate on the term "subjective experience," using it in the introduction as if it were going mean your current, right-this-moment experience (e.g., "I am in pain now," which imparts a huge wow factor for readers, so I can see why), then proceeded to give a bunch of examples where "subjective experience" means something you subjectively experienced in the past, or had trouble bringing fully into conscious awareness in the first place.

Then, at the very end, you equivocate back to the Humean sense of this-moment conscious experience and flounder into this whopper:

We can be wrong about our own subjective conscious experiences. Thus, they cannot serve as a bedrock for certainty and a priori truth.

Sure, past subjective conscious experience is something we can be wrong about. We can misremember things. Hume's (and others') point is that we cannot be wrong about things like, "I am seeing blue right now." If you doubt things like that, you must apply at least that same level of doubt to everything else, such as whether you are really reading a LessWrong comment instead of being chased by hungry sharks right now.

I've been enjoying your recent posts, but I wish you would resist the urge to sensationalize and overgeneralize just to grab more eyeballs.