Yes, "feeling" and "experience", are pretty much the same thing,
So they are either both meaningful, or both meaningless. But you have used "experience" as though it is meaningful, and you have implied that "feeling" is meaningless.
That was a predictable problem. Physical identity theory requires statements of the form " is equivalent to ". if you reject all vocabulary relating to mental sates, you cannot make that kind of statement, and so cannot express identity theory.
At this point someone could suggest that, if we started with the assumption that each object has an associated "chairness", then that is what we would want to compare. I'm sure you can see why that doesn't solve anything. And yet this is exactly what you do with experiences, from my point of view.
Whereas, from my point of view, 1st person experience was there all along.
But you have used "experience" as though it is meaningful, and you have implied that "feeling" is meaningless.
No, I used "experience" as a label. Let me rewrite that part:
That's assuming that "experience", as you use that word, is a meaningful category. If you didn't start from that assumption, and instead defined experiences as brain states, you could ...
Is that better? I understand that having two definitions and two similar but not identical concepts in one sentence is confusing. But still I expect you to figur...
(This post grew out of an old conversation with Wei Dai.)
Imagine a person sitting in a room, communicating with the outside world through a terminal. Further imagine that the person knows some secret fact (e.g. that the Moon landings were a hoax), but is absolutely committed to never revealing their knowledge of it in any way.
Can you, by observing the input-output behavior of the system, distinguish it from a person who doesn't know the secret, or knows some other secret instead?
Clearly the only reasonable answer is "no, not in general".
Now imagine a person in the same situation, claiming to possess some mental skill that's hard for you to verify (e.g. visualizing four-dimensional objects in their mind's eye). Can you, by observing the input-output behavior, distinguish it from someone who is lying about having the skill, but has a good grasp of four-dimensional math otherwise?
Again, clearly, the only reasonable answer is "not in general".
Now imagine a sealed box that behaves exactly like a human, dutifully saying things like "I'm conscious", "I experience red" and so on. Moreover, you know from trustworthy sources that the box was built by scanning a human brain, and then optimizing the resulting program to use less CPU and memory (preserving the same input-output behavior). Would you be willing to trust that the box is in fact conscious, and has the same internal experiences as the human brain it was created from?
A philosopher believing in computationalism would emphatically say yes. But considering the examples above, I would say I'm not sure! Not at all!