Jonathan,
Your post suggests to me a neat way to define what is special about first
person experience: it is the gap in information between what can be known
from a description of an object and what can be known from being the object
itself. This is a personal thing, but I think it is at least a little
surprising that there should be such a gap, and would never have guessed had
I not been conscious myself. I don't think it is a good idea to simply
ignore this gap, but on the other hand, I don't think there is any need to
postulate mind/body dualism and try to explain how the two interact. Aside
from this one difference I have focussed on, first person experience is just
something that occurs in the normal course of events in the physical
universe.
--Stathis Papaioannou
> >Stathis: I agree with Lee's and Jonathan's comments, except that I
> > think there is something unusual about first person
> > experience/ qualia/ consciousness in that there is an aspect
> > that cannot be communicated unless you experience it (a blind
> > man cannot know what it is like to see, no matter how much he
> > learns about the process of vision). Let me use the analogy
> > of billiard balls and Newtonian mechanics. Everything that
> > billiard balls do by themselves and with each other can be
> > fully explained by the laws of physics. Moreover, it can all
> > be modelled by a computer program. But in addition, there is
> > the state of being-a-billiard-ball, which is something very
> > strange and cannot be communicated to non-billiard balls,
> > because it makes absolutely no difference to what is observed
> > about them. It is not clear if this aspect of billiard ball
> > "experience" is duplicated by the computer program, precisely
> > because it makes no observable difference: you have to be the
> > simulated billiard ball to know.
>
>But is this "state of being a billiard ball" any different than simple
>existence? What in particular is unusual about first person qualia? We
>might
>simply say that a *description* of a billiard ball is not the same as *a
>billiard ball* (a description of a billiard ball can not bruise me like a
>real one can); in the same way, a description of a mind is not the same as
>a
>mind; but what is unusual about that? It is not strange to differentiate
>between a real object and a description of such, so I don't see that there
>is anything any more unusual about first person experience. Is it any
>stranger that a blind man can not see, than that a description of a
>billiard
>ball's properties (weight, diameter, colour etc) can not bruise me?
>
>Jonathan Colvin
>
> > You don't need to postulate a special mechanism whereby mind
> > interacts with matter. The laws of physics explain the
> > workings of the brain, and conscious experience is just the
> > strange, irreducible effect of this as seen from the inside.
>
> >
> > --Stathis Papaioannou
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Received on Tue May 17 2005 - 09:19:19 PDT