Psy-K, try as I might to come up with a way to do it, I can see no possibility of an objective test for subjective experience.
There’s really no way to defeat dualism except through faith in materialism. If you don’t take it as a given that science can be complete (despite Godel’s lesson that mathematics can’t be) you can’t actually reach the point where the case is proven. I’ve seen dozens of different approaches to handwaving this problem away and they are all deeply irrational appeals to “emergent processes” that mean nothing beyond “I choose to beg the question.”
The methods of science work because they are objective. The problem of consciousness is about the existence or non-existence of subjective experience. The gap cannot be bridged by objective methods. It’s all guesswork, not because we haven’t found the secret clue yet, but because even if we could find it, we could never prove it was the right clue.
Psy-K, try as I might to come up with a way to do it, I can see no possibility of an objective test for subjective experience.
There’s really no way to defeat dualism except through faith in materialism. If you don’t take it as a given that science can be complete (despite Godel’s lesson that mathematics can’t be) you can’t actually reach the point where the case is proven. I’ve seen dozens of different approaches to handwaving this problem away and they are all deeply irrational appeals to “emergent processes” that mean nothing beyond “I choose to beg the question.”
The methods of science work because they are objective. The problem of consciousness is about the existence or non-existence of subjective experience. The gap cannot be bridged by objective methods. It’s all guesswork, not because we haven’t found the secret clue yet, but because even if we could find it, we could never prove it was the right clue.