MBlume comments on The uniquely awful example of theism - Less Wrong

36 Post author: gjm 10 April 2009 12:30AM

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Comment author: MBlume 10 April 2009 03:28:40AM 2 points [-]

A human mind is a physical object in the universe, mine as well as yours. An experience that you have should not produce a qualitatively different update in beliefs to an experience I report. In either case, the fact of the matter is, on such and such date and time, a human brain under such and such circumstances underwent such and such experiences.

To take it to an extreme case, no one has access to information which a scientist with a super-MRI machine observing the excitation of each individual neuron does not, in principle, have.

Comment author: Alicorn 10 April 2009 04:43:27AM 2 points [-]

Yes, of course - but I don't have a super-MRI. I can't access the content of my friends' experiences; I can't take it into account the way I could entertain a communicable proposition, because they can't even describe their experiences. If someone tells me a piece of evidence that would be excellent evidence for proposition P, but they say it in Swahili, I have no such evidence for P.