LISTSERV - TOK-SOCIETY-L Archives

On Thu, Oct 31, 2019 at 9:28 AM Lene Rachel Andersen - Nordic Bildung / Fremvirke <[log in to unmask]> wrote:

Playing along and accepting that this device ends up in your head, how would you know that what you experience is in fact what the other person or the dog experiences?

For the answer, let me start with another question.

When you perceive a strawberry in your right field of vision, your physical knowledge of such, which has a redness quality, is in your left hemisphere. At the same time, if there is a leaf in your left field of vision, knowledge of that, which has a physical greenness quality exist in your right hemisphere. How would your left hemisphere know that what your other hemisphere is experiencing is in fact what the other hemisphere or the dog experiences?

Physical things can have both a color (the kind of light they reflect, which is only abstract, no qualitative meaning) and a coolness we can be directly aware of. Once experimentalists stop being qualia blind (using more than one word to represent different physical qualities) we’ll finally discover what colorness things in the brain have. If we objectively observe that another person is using the physical stuff which has your greenness quality to represent red things, we will be able to make objectively justified effing of the ineffable statements like: “My redness is like your greenness”.

Again, it 's not a hard mind body problem. It's just an approachable color problem. We just need to improve our sloppy epistemology of what color or what physical qualities something has. The falsifiable prediction is that the causal properties of redness, and the causal properties of glutamate are the same thing. In other words, glutamate and redness are abstract labels for the same physical thing. Once experimentalists start making this connect (that redness is our subjective direct awareness of glutamate, as it reacts in a synapse) this will connect the subjective with the objective, making the introspective, objectively observable and shareable. Then we can finally objectively eff the ineffable nature of elemental physical qualities like redness and greenness.

Color of glutamate: white (it reflects white light)

Colorness of glutamate: redness, which we are directly aware of.