Brent,
there is wisdom in your views - b u t -...
Does anybody really 'know'- 'experience'-and indeed: ' feel' what and how
another person idenfifies internally feeling the color red?
All physical-physiological data can be fixed, yet it is open whether
another person feels 'red' as I do 'green. (Long standing debate os psych
lists).
Then again we forget the big mystery: the (feeling of) SELF, and I mean it
in a wider sense, not only human. I try to identify it (am not satisfied)
with the broader effect of an intereffecting relational group on its
wide-range environmental impacts. The 'self' does not end at the skin (I say
that metaphorically), but depends on the 'within-skin' processes of
interrelated and self-reflected relations in the 'beyond skin' relations.
Now these are just as individual,as DNA or fingerprint (just 2 silly
examples) and so is the interrelation with the beyond-skin world. No two
'self-s' relate identically.
We may KNOW (observe, calculate, learn) all data about the processes
exercised by the inter-skinnal components (e.g. brain) but not the
extraskinnal relations in a world of continual change. Not with our ongoing
instrumentation.
This is for today. We may learn more by tomorrow.
John M
----- Original Message -----
From: "Brent Meeker" <meekerdb.domain.name.hidden>
To: <everything-list.domain.name.hidden>
Sent: Friday, July 21, 2006 4:40 PM
Subject: Re: Bruno's argument
Quentin Anciaux wrote:
> Le Vendredi 21 Juillet 2006 22:08, Brent Meeker a écrit :
>
>>No, the hypothetical was stronger than that: it was that I knew exactly
>>how
>>your brain worked to the degree that I could make one.
>
>
> You could know everything on how my brain works without being ever able
> feeling being me... And I repeat if you could then you would be me by
> definition. Me is the only one able to feel being me... It is non-sense to
> claim otherwise, what ever you could know on the external working and
> behavior of myself.
As I understood the question was whether we could ever know how another
person/brain/alien felt -
not whether we could experience their feeling. Obviously only the person
having the experience
feels/percieves it. But I think it is plausible that, knowing the how a
alien brain was constructed
and how it worked (as we do a planaria's) and how the alien interacted with
the world and behaved,
then we could infer whether or not, for example, it felt pain and when and
what brain processes
corresponded to feeling pain. I'm not sure that this is the case - but it
maybe.
In other words it is not justified, based on our limited understanding of
brains, to say we'll never
be able to know how another feels based on observation of their brain.
Brent Meeker
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Received on Sat Jul 22 2006 - 11:36:32 PDT