Do you know how to distinguish “actually feeling pain” from “acting as if” it feels pain?
Well, I suppose you’d do it the same way you’d distinguish “actually has a cat in a box” from “pretending to have a cat in a box” (without checking the box).
I do think there’s something weird going on with consciousness—why there is something that thinks it has the experience of having thoughts and experiences is as yet unexplained, and is tricky to talk about given the inability to directly access the subject matter—but I imagine it’s in principle explicable.
And saying we need to find a “mysterious” way of understanding it… well, there are all sorts of reasons why that’s not going to work.
Well, I suppose you’d do it the same way you’d distinguish “actually has a cat in a box” from “pretending to have a cat in a box” (without checking the box).
If there is no way to check the content of the box, ever, in any conceivable way, then there is no difference, period.
Sure. But that’s not true of cats / boxes, nor is it necessarily true of consciousness (based on the notion that consciousness is in principle explicable / reducible). The parallels being that we can’t check now, the person acts in such a way that the cat/consciousness is/isn’t a parsimonious explanation of their behavior, it might be difficult to check, you can fake it (to some degree), you can be wrong about it… and perhaps the cat might be a delusion.
Moreover, some people here claim to have values that encompass things that they cannot in principle interact with in any way (things external to their light cone, for example), so I’m not sure your assertion is unproblematic. If you’re going to step on my box, it matters to me whether there’s a cat in it, even if you can’t check that, and it might in fact matter to you as well. But facts tend to have ripples, so it seems likely that there is, in principle at least, a way to check the catbox.
Well, I suppose you’d do it the same way you’d distinguish “actually has a cat in a box” from “pretending to have a cat in a box” (without checking the box).
I do think there’s something weird going on with consciousness—why there is something that thinks it has the experience of having thoughts and experiences is as yet unexplained, and is tricky to talk about given the inability to directly access the subject matter—but I imagine it’s in principle explicable.
And saying we need to find a “mysterious” way of understanding it… well, there are all sorts of reasons why that’s not going to work.
If there is no way to check the content of the box, ever, in any conceivable way, then there is no difference, period.
Sure. But that’s not true of cats / boxes, nor is it necessarily true of consciousness (based on the notion that consciousness is in principle explicable / reducible). The parallels being that we can’t check now, the person acts in such a way that the cat/consciousness is/isn’t a parsimonious explanation of their behavior, it might be difficult to check, you can fake it (to some degree), you can be wrong about it… and perhaps the cat might be a delusion.
Moreover, some people here claim to have values that encompass things that they cannot in principle interact with in any way (things external to their light cone, for example), so I’m not sure your assertion is unproblematic. If you’re going to step on my box, it matters to me whether there’s a cat in it, even if you can’t check that, and it might in fact matter to you as well. But facts tend to have ripples, so it seems likely that there is, in principle at least, a way to check the catbox.