A lot of words but you don’t grapple with the hard problem of consciousness. When I look at the sun, how can you know I feel/see the same thing as you? Yes I’ll use words, ‘yellow’, ‘warm’, ‘bright’ etc because we’ve been taught those label what we are experiencing. But it says nothing about whether my experience is the same as yours.
What do you mean by “you don’t grapple with the hard problem of consciousness”? (Is this just an abstruse way of saying “no, you’re wrong” to set up the following description of how I’m wrong? In that case, I’m not sure you have a leg to stand on when you say that I use “a lot of words”.) Edit: to be a bit more charitable, maybe it means “my model has elements that my model of your model doesn’t model”.
How can you know I see the same thing that you do? That depends on what you mean by “same”. To me, to talk about whether things are the same, we need to specify what characteristics we care about, or what category system we’re using. I know what it means for two animals to be of the same species, and what it means for two people to have the same parent. But for any two things to be the same, period, doesn’t really mean anything on its own. (You could argue that everything is the same as itself, but that’s a trivial case.)
This might seem like I’m saying that there isn’t any fundamental truth, only many ways of splitting the world up into categories. Not exactly. I don’t think there’s any fundamental truth to categories. There might be fundamental monads, or something like that, but human subjective experiences are definitely not fundamental. (And what truths can even be said of a stateless monad when considered on its own?)
A lot of words but you don’t grapple with the hard problem of consciousness. When I look at the sun, how can you know I feel/see the same thing as you? Yes I’ll use words, ‘yellow’, ‘warm’, ‘bright’ etc because we’ve been taught those label what we are experiencing. But it says nothing about whether my experience is the same as yours.
What do you mean by “you don’t grapple with the hard problem of consciousness”? (Is this just an abstruse way of saying “no, you’re wrong” to set up the following description of how I’m wrong? In that case, I’m not sure you have a leg to stand on when you say that I use “a lot of words”.) Edit: to be a bit more charitable, maybe it means “my model has elements that my model of your model doesn’t model”.
How can you know I see the same thing that you do? That depends on what you mean by “same”. To me, to talk about whether things are the same, we need to specify what characteristics we care about, or what category system we’re using. I know what it means for two animals to be of the same species, and what it means for two people to have the same parent. But for any two things to be the same, period, doesn’t really mean anything on its own. (You could argue that everything is the same as itself, but that’s a trivial case.)
This might seem like I’m saying that there isn’t any fundamental truth, only many ways of splitting the world up into categories. Not exactly. I don’t think there’s any fundamental truth to categories. There might be fundamental monads, or something like that, but human subjective experiences are definitely not fundamental. (And what truths can even be said of a stateless monad when considered on its own?)