Brent, Experiential consciousness is “contained” within the individual. It is a fact noted by many, many people. In my current book, I call the inability to directly access another’s subjective experience the “epistemological gap”. If there is some confusion, it likely is that our language games are crossed. It is the fundamental perceptual difference between the first and third person on the world. This is what Wilber means when he divides the interior from the exterior<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Integral_theory_(Ken_Wilber)>. We can represent a third person view as something a camera captures. A camera can never capture someone’s first person phenomenology. As noted in this blog<https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/theory-knowledge/201910/there-are-two-hard-problems-consciousness-not-one>, this is the epistemological aspect of the hard problem. We certainly can feel and relate to others’ subjective experience, but this is only indirectly. For example, we humans can talk about it. Like the example you used re greenness and redness…but all of that was mediated via language was through discussion. Physiological changes, overt actions, and verbal descriptions are what are available from the third person view. They allow us to hone in on subjectivity in others. For example, there are people with “locked in” syndrome. They are fully conscious on the inside but are completely inactive on the outside. We can learn about that they are awake via asking them questions and tracking their neurophysiological activity. Once again, though, this is indirect data. Here is a quote from George Mandler on this issue: [N]o cognitive psychologist worth his salt today thinks of subjective experience as a datum. It’s a construct. . . .Your private experience is a theoretical construct to me. I have no direct access to your private experience. I do have direct access to your behavior. In that sense, I’m a behaviorist. In that sense, everybody is a behaviorist today. (Mandler in Baars, 1986, p. 256) Likewise, we can learn that someone has synesthesia<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Synesthesia>. It is worth noting here that synesthesia was at first thought to be people lying or delusional until enough reports came forward. This is because it could be only experienced directly by the person. You can do a thought experiment on this. Entertain the idea that someone in your sphere of influence is a philosophical zombie<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philosophical_zombie>. That is, they look and act like a person, but they have no inner experience. You will instantly know that you are not a zombie. For everyone else, it would be impossible believe…but it would still be theoretically possible to be true. That is good evidence for the epistemological gap across experiential consciousness. Bottom line is that we can’t directly experientially see, hear, feel another’s experiential consciousness. Ever. In fact, akin to Pauli Exclusion principle for fermions<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pauli_exclusion_principle>, we can say that no two people can ever directly share the same experiential consciousness. Moreover, each of us is fully bound to experience through our own experiential system. This epistemological gap is one of the key reasons I differentiate Mind1 and Mind2. Best, Gregg From: tree of knowledge system discussion <[log in to unmask]> On Behalf Of Chance McDermott Sent: Wednesday, October 7, 2020 5:54 AM To: [log in to unmask] Subject: Re: Consciousness and awareness Does this new category based upon a shared language not put us in the interpersonally shared domain of reality? Still you cannot know my green in how I truly experience it, but our cooperation and understanding create a second, shared interpersonal reality. If a third person arrives at this party, we would have to agree, the three of us to a shared reality that encompasses (my red, your green, her blue). Eventually, the party gets crowded, and through the debate and confusion, overtime, emerge shared language games that reveal a potential objective reality beyond agreement or disagreement. The fact that you cannot know my experiential reality may even be the justification for individual personhood On Tue, Oct 6, 2020 at 8:18 PM Brent Allsop <[log in to unmask]<mailto:[log in to unmask]>> wrote: On Sun, Oct 4, 2020 at 8:00 AM Henriques, Gregg - henriqgx <[log in to unmask]<mailto:[log in to unmask]>> wrote: Experiential consciousness is not available from the third person exterior epistemological position I disagree with this. All 3rd person communication is simply abstract, so requires definitions (otherwise you don’t know what a word like ‘red’ means). But that does not mean the ineffable cannot be effed. All you need to do is use non qualia blind language (use more than one abstract word for all things red like red=”anything that reflects or emits red light” and a different word for the different intrinsic quality of your knowledge of red things = “redNESS”) and then define those terms. Here is an example effing statement that makes it available from third person and bridges the explanatory gap, simply by using multiple defined terms: [cid:image001.png@01D69C72.3BDF19D0] “My redness is like your greenness, both of which we call red” Also, the emerging consensus camp called RepresentationalQualia Theory<https://urldefense.proofpoint.com/v2/url?u=https-3A__canonizer.com_topic_88-2DRepresentational-2DQualia_6&d=DwMFaQ&c=eLbWYnpnzycBCgmb7vCI4uqNEB9RSjOdn_5nBEmmeq0&r=HPo1IXYDhKClogP-UOpybo6Cfxxz-jIYBgjO2gOz4-A&m=XsPFwQyV1SGrGBxDcJPHUaKl0BthQb7hqsl0ZtsaODA&s=8ZTYrjwQMu2iU5WZ-adnqGBmATlG0ryyLsRa6I57M0Q&e=> defines consciousness to simply be “Computationally bound elemental intrinsic qualities like redness and greenness.” Consciousness or everything you are aware of at any point in time is a composite qualitative experience. If you are consciously aware of something, that conscious knowledge must be something. And there must be something that is binding whatever that is in with the rest of your composite awareness. There are lots of things that you “know” but aren’t thinking about, so all that is included in “sub consciousness”. In computers, the only place computational binding occurs is the computational binding of multiple registers in the CPU, so it helps to think of it that way. So consciousness is one big computationally bound CPU. If you know something, but aren’t thinking about it, it is still in subconsciousness (no binding). When you think about it, this knowledge is loaded into the CPU, where it can be computationally bound to our composite qualitative experience that is everything we are consciously aware of at any point in time. ############################ To unsubscribe from the TOK-SOCIETY-L list: write to: mailto:[log in to unmask]<mailto:mailto:[log in to unmask]> or click the following link: http://listserv.jmu.edu/cgi-bin/wa?SUBED1=TOK-SOCIETY-L&A=1 ############################ To unsubscribe from the TOK-SOCIETY-L list: write to: mailto:[log in to unmask]<mailto:mailto:[log in to unmask]> or click the following link: http://listserv.jmu.edu/cgi-bin/wa?SUBED1=TOK-SOCIETY-L&A=1 ############################ To unsubscribe from the TOK-SOCIETY-L list: write to: mailto:[log in to unmask] or click the following link: http://listserv.jmu.edu/cgi-bin/wa?SUBED1=TOK-SOCIETY-L&A=1