I'll admit that I'm now getting lost in all the words. (It's also distressing that yet another Russell has shown up.)
Here's a bit of an exchange Nick and I had privately. He suggested (and I fully agree) that we should continue it on the list. Nick asked me to respond to his earlier comment about Unicorns. So I said, Regarding unicorns, you raise an interesting issue. You said, *I understand what you mean when you talk of unicorns; that doesn't make me a sneaky believer in unicorns, does it?* I'm not so sure that works with first person statements (subjective experience, qualia). How could anyone know what qualia are without experiencing them? It's like saying I know what you mean by the taste of chocolate even though I've never tasted it and don't even believe that there is taste such as what you call chocolate. In that case, how could you possibly claim to understand what I mean by the taste of chocolate. You've probably heard the famous thought experiment of Mary the color-blind scientist.She knew all there is to know about color; she could predict what anyone would say about color by examining the patterns of photons that entered their eyes (and perhaps the firings in their brains as those photon hits were processed). But she herself saw the world in black and white. Then miraculously, she gained color vision. She has (let's assume) no new knowledge as a result of her new color vision -- since she knew all there was to know about color and color vision already. All she has are new experiences of color -- subjective experiences of color. Has anything changed for her? My answer is "yes." Is yours "no"? Nick responded. She doesn't have a new experience Of COLOR. She sees a colored world. The world is now from her point of view a colored world. My mary is seeing the colored world directly; your mary is seeing a color experience. It's the intrusion of the cartesian theatre that I find distressing. At least. CF Wittgenstein. My response. I'm not promoting a Cartesian Theater perspective since I take a Cartesian Theater to imply a homunculus, i.e., an internal being (construct) that is standing back from the "performance/exhibit" ongoing in the Cartesian Theater and observing it. That clearly leads to an infinite regress: How does the homunculus itself work? Does it have it's own Cartesian Theater? Etc. I would also say that it's MY Mary that is seeing the world directly, that she has an immediate subjective experience of the world, which is what I mean by subjective experience. If there were a homunculus, it would be seeing a color presentation being presented in the Cartesian Theater. Perhaps this has just been a big misunderstanding. When my Mary sees a colored world, I feel perfectly comfortable saying that she is having an experience of color and that (tautologically) she didn't have that experience prior to being able to experience color. You seem to want to reject putting it in those terms. I don't understand your objection to that way of speaking. Also, to get back to my question about Mary. I say that something has changed *for her* (and I would refer to what has changed as (part of) her subjective experience). I gather that you agree that something has changed. How would you characterize the change that's occurred. And recall, we are stipulating that there is no behavioral difference between Mary before and after she gained the ability to see a colored world. I'm now answering my own question and thinking that you will ask whether there is a neuronal difference. I'll agree that there is and that her way of processing color has changed. If we took brain scans her brain would be functioning differently. So from that perspective you could argue (and I would agree) that there is an externally observable difference. This brings us to the notion of supervenience. We both agree that there are neuronal differences. I claim that subjective experience supervenes over neuronal phenomena. You say that neuronal phenomena are all there are(?). If that's your position (and perhaps it isn't since I seem to be putting words in your mouth by trying to answer the question from what I take to be your position), it's very much a reductionist perspective. You are denying the reality of higher level constructs because you can reduce them to lower level phenomena. I say (and that's what my "Reductionist blind spot" was about) that the ability to reduce things to lower level phenomena doesn't eliminate the reality of the higher level phenomena. In a word processor, words as entities are real even though there is nothing in the computer except bits. But I want to bring this back to ethics. We would agree that pain has neurologically observable features. But it seems to me that such observations cannot lead to ethical imperatives unless one associates them with the (subjective) experience of pain. But I've probably put too much into this post already. -- Russ
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