= 27d567bc2d48d9f40e9ccc20ea370b15)
shokwave comments on Being Wrong about Your Own Subjective Experience - 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 (187)
Well, yes, but this feels to me to be about as trivial as saying "You can be wrong about the correct answer to a maths question, but you can't be wrong about what answer you're giving".
IMO you can be wrong about all of those things, just like you can be wrong about anything else. Your apparent belief that you can't seems to indicate that you define the contents of those beliefs in a self-referential way which seems weird to me. The only beliefs I'd even consider as candidates for being impossible to be wrong about in that way would be unambiguously tautological ones.
I am far closer to your position than sark's, I must admit. Lukeprog provided examples of how we can be wrong about our subjective experience, and commenters reached for more abstract subjective experiences; some of which we can also be wrong about (ie Alicorn's peripheral vision card experiment, the story about blind echolocation believed to be "forehead touch") and some of which are defined self-referentially so that we can't be wrong about it, purely by the virtue of the answer we give being the answer required. The self-referential subjective experiences (such as "I experience myself giving the answer 5 to the question 2+2=?") aren't useful; they're tautological. When it comes to subjective experiences that actually do work, we can be wrong. The only work that tautological subjective experiences do is contradict lukeprog's claim.
It's certainly possible to say one thing while thinking you're saying another, though!
Perhaps it's simply my lack of experience with philosophy, but I fail to see any qualitative distinction between common perceptual failures like optical illusions, versus those examples given by lukeprog in the OP. I'm sure lukeprog is setting this up to do some work in one of his later posts in the series. But at this point given no particular reason to draw a boundary anywhere except at the tautology, I draw it at the tautology.