= 27d567bc2d48d9f40e9ccc20ea370b15)
TheOtherDave comments on Adding up to normality - 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 (49)
The concrete examples are helpful, thank you.
Can we be equally concrete about what it means for a claim like "the number eight appears green" to be nonsense?
I mean, the number eight certainly doesn't appear green to me. And when a synesthesiac reports that they experience the number eight as green, I don't really have a clear sense of what experience they are describing... the closest I can come is imagining that whenever I think about the number eight, I perceive a color shift in my environment similar to putting a green gel on stage lights, which I'm pretty sure is not at all like what they experience.
So, how would I go about establishing whether their report is nonsense?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category_mistake
This is what I have in mind.
While I was looking this up, I learned that the sentence... Buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo. ...is both grammatically valid, and not nonsense.
Experiments verifying synesthesia.
(nods) I'm aware of this sort of data, but it's not in the least clear to me whether they qualify as evidence that such a report is or isn't nonsense by Esar's account, or on what basis they might do either.