thoughts don’t behave much like perceptions at all
Can you expand on what you mean by that? There are many ways in which thoughts behave quite a bit like perceptions, which is unsurprising since they are both examples of operations clusters of neurons can perform, which is a relatively narrow class of operations. Video games behave quite a bit like spreadsheets in a similar way.
Of course, there are also many ways in which video games behave nothing at all like spreadsheets, and thoughts behave nothing like perceptions.
Naively speaking, if Alice can think a thought, she can just tell Bob, and he will. Dogs can’t tell us what ultrasounds sound like, but that’s for the same reason they can’t tell us what regular sounds sound like.
Even if we posit that for every pair of humans X,Y if X thinks thought T then Y is capable of thinking T, it doesn’t follow that for all possible Ts, X and Y are capable of thinking T.
That is, whether Alice can think the thought in the first place is not clear.
Ah, I thought you were limiting yourself to humans, given your example.
If you’re asserting that for every pair of cognitive systems X,Y (including animals, aliens, sufficiently sophisticated software, etc.) if X thinks thought T then Y is capable of thinking T, then we just disagree.
Yes, transmission of thoughts between sufficiently different minds breaks down, so we recover the possibility of thoughts that can be thought but not by us. But that’s a sufficiently different reason from why there are sensations we can’t perceive to show that the analogy is very shallow.
Can you expand on what you mean by that? There are many ways in which thoughts behave quite a bit like perceptions, which is unsurprising since they are both examples of operations clusters of neurons can perform, which is a relatively narrow class of operations. Video games behave quite a bit like spreadsheets in a similar way.
Of course, there are also many ways in which video games behave nothing at all like spreadsheets, and thoughts behave nothing like perceptions.
Naively speaking, if Alice can think a thought, she can just tell Bob, and he will. Dogs can’t tell us what ultrasounds sound like, but that’s for the same reason they can’t tell us what regular sounds sound like.
That’s assuming the thought can be expressed in language.
Even if we posit that for every pair of humans X,Y if X thinks thought T then Y is capable of thinking T, it doesn’t follow that for all possible Ts, X and Y are capable of thinking T.
That is, whether Alice can think the thought in the first place is not clear.
If you limit yourself to humans, yes. But at least one mind has to be able to think a thought for that thought to exist.
Ah, I thought you were limiting yourself to humans, given your example.
If you’re asserting that for every pair of cognitive systems X,Y (including animals, aliens, sufficiently sophisticated software, etc.) if X thinks thought T then Y is capable of thinking T, then we just disagree.
Yes, transmission of thoughts between sufficiently different minds breaks down, so we recover the possibility of thoughts that can be thought but not by us. But that’s a sufficiently different reason from why there are sensations we can’t perceive to show that the analogy is very shallow.