You've said this before, although you haven't come out and actually said
there is no such thing as first person experience. The only way I can think
of to use third person data to gain first person knowledge, aside from using
it to guess how close it is to your own first person experience, is to
actually emulate the mind in question using your own brain, effectively
joining the two minds so that they can directly share their experiences.
Maybe a being many times more intelligent than we are would be able to do
just this, and know true empathy.
Stathis Papaioannou
On 2/23/07, Brent Meeker <meekerdb.domain.name.hidden> wrote:
Stathis Papaioannou wrote:
> Stathis: 'I can meaningfully talk about "seeing red" to a blind
> person who has no idea what the experience is like ... '
>
> MP: OK, but can he or she meaningfully understand you?
>
>
> They can understand many things about sight without actually
> understanding what it is like to have it, just as we can understand many
> things about a bat's sonar, in many ways much more than the bat
> understands. But that part of vision or bat sonar which cannot be
> understood unless the observer has it himself, no matter how good the
> collected empirical data, is what is meant by first person experience.
>
> Stathis Papaioannou
I'm not convinced that there is any such first person experience.
Brent Meeker
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Received on Fri Feb 23 2007 - 01:24:47 PST