Well, suppose you had never seen the color red, and I wanted us to have a discussion of what red looks like. You would tell me that in order to know what red looks like, I need to first define it in terms of the concepts you are already familiar with.
This makes sense, but if we had to do that with every concept, it wouldn’t work, because then we wouldn’t have any concepts to start out from. And if you’ve never seen anything reddish, I can’t give you an explanation that would let you derive red from the concepts you are already familiar with.
So instead I might tell you “see that color that my finger is pointing at? That’s red.” And then you could look, and hopefully say “oh, okay, I get it now.”
I’m trying to do the same thing here. Of course, the problem is, I’m trying to point at an aspect of internal experience, rather than anything in the external world.
But I’ve done the best I can to give you pointers towards the thing that I expect to be found within your experience if you just know where to look. To extend the color analogy, this is as if I knew there was a line of increasingly reddish objects arrayed somewhere, and I told you to go find the first object and follow along the line and watch them getting increasingly red, and then at the end, you would know what red looks like.
You said that the Kaj/Harris/Kelly/etc. thing is a rather bad philosophy. It is if you evaluate it in terms of a philosophy that is supposed to have a self-contained argument! But that’s not its purpose—or at least not the starting point. The purpose is to give you a set of instructions that are hopefully good enough to point out the thing it’s talking about, and then when you’ve looked at your experience and found it, you’ll get what the rest is trying to say.
Your metaphor doesn’t quite work, because you are trying really hard to show me the color red, only to then argue I’m a fool for thinking there is such a thing as red.
As in, it might be that no person on Earth has such a naive concept of subjective experience, but they are not used to expressing it in language, then when you try to make them express subjective experience in language and/or explain it to them, they say
Oh, that makes no sense, you’re right
Instead of saying:
Oh yeah, I guess I can’t define this concept central to everything about being human after 10 seconds of thinking in more than 1 catchphrase.
But again, what I’m saying above is subjective, please go back and consider my statement regarding language, if we disagree there, then there’s not much to discuss (or the discussion is rather much longer and moves into other areas), because at the end of the day, I literally can not know what your talking about. Maybe I have a vague impression from years of meditation as to what you are referring to...or maybe not, maybe whatever you had in your experience is much more different and we are discussing two completely different things, but since we are very vague when referring to them, we think we have a disagreement in what we see, when instead we’re just looking in completely different places.
Your metaphor doesn’t quite work, because you are trying really hard to show me the color red, only to then argue I’m a fool for thinking there is such a thing as red.
No? I am trying to point you to something in your subjective experience, exactly because it is something that exists in your experience, and which seems like an integral part of how minds are organized. I’m definitely not going to argue that you are a fool for having it, because by default everyone has it.
As in, it might be that no person on Earth has such a naive concept of subjective experience, but they are not used to expressing it in language, then when you try to make them express subjective experience in language and/or explain it to them, they say
Oh, that makes no sense, you’re right
Instead of saying:
Oh yeah, I guess I can’t define this concept central to everything about being human after 10 seconds of thinking in more than 1 catchphrase.
But my claim is not “there’s a concept in your experience that you can’t define in words”… I defined it in words in my article! I even explained it in third-person terms, in the sense of “if a computer program made the same mistake, what would be the objectively-verifiable mistake in that.”
I am just saying that while the mistake is perfectly easy to define in third-person terms, I cannot give you a definition that would directly link it up to your first-person experience. Because while words can be used to point at the experience, they cannot define the experience in a way that would create it.
We can see where a computer program that committed this mistake would go wrong, but we do not see ourselves from a third-person perspective, so I cannot give you a third-person explanation that would cause the third-person explanation and the first-person experience to link up directly. But I can suggest ways in which you can examine your first-person experience, and then when you have the third-person explanation, the two can link up.
(Note that I am explicitly deviating from the Buddhist writers who say that it’s intrinsically impossible to understand what’s going on. I get why they are saying that: the Buddhists of old didn’t know about computers or simulations, so they didn’t have a third-person framework in which the thing can be explained. But we do, and that’s why I’ve explicitly given you the third-person framework, or at least tried to.)
A person who is shown red for the first time could also say “oh, right, that’s red; you’re right that I couldn’t have defined it in words”, but unlike your comment suggests, the “I couldn’t have defined it in words” isn’t the important part of the “oh”. The important part is “oh, now I can assign a meaning to your sentence in a way that causes its odd syntax to make sense, and now I can think more clearly about what something like ‘seeing red’ means”.
But again, what I’m saying above is subjective, please go back and consider my statement regarding language, if we disagree there, then there’s not much to discuss (or the discussion is rather much longer and moves into other areas), because at the end of the day, I literally can not know what your talking about.
If I may ask, how much time did you spend actually following the suggestions in the post and trying to find what the thing that I’m pointing at?
It’s certainly not “literally impossible”. Some are lucky enough to find it the moment they are pointed towards it. Others may have difficulty, and of course, given the fact that human minds vary and some people lack universal experiences, I cannot disprove the possibility that there could some people who naturally lack this experience at all.
But I do expect that most people can find it—maybe it takes a minute, maybe ten, maybe a year, I have no idea of what the average and the median here might be. But you have to actually try looking for it.
Well, suppose you had never seen the color red, and I wanted us to have a discussion of what red looks like. You would tell me that in order to know what red looks like, I need to first define it in terms of the concepts you are already familiar with.
This makes sense, but if we had to do that with every concept, it wouldn’t work, because then we wouldn’t have any concepts to start out from. And if you’ve never seen anything reddish, I can’t give you an explanation that would let you derive red from the concepts you are already familiar with.
So instead I might tell you “see that color that my finger is pointing at? That’s red.” And then you could look, and hopefully say “oh, okay, I get it now.”
I’m trying to do the same thing here. Of course, the problem is, I’m trying to point at an aspect of internal experience, rather than anything in the external world.
But I’ve done the best I can to give you pointers towards the thing that I expect to be found within your experience if you just know where to look. To extend the color analogy, this is as if I knew there was a line of increasingly reddish objects arrayed somewhere, and I told you to go find the first object and follow along the line and watch them getting increasingly red, and then at the end, you would know what red looks like.
You said that the Kaj/Harris/Kelly/etc. thing is a rather bad philosophy. It is if you evaluate it in terms of a philosophy that is supposed to have a self-contained argument! But that’s not its purpose—or at least not the starting point. The purpose is to give you a set of instructions that are hopefully good enough to point out the thing it’s talking about, and then when you’ve looked at your experience and found it, you’ll get what the rest is trying to say.
Your metaphor doesn’t quite work, because you are trying really hard to show me the color red, only to then argue I’m a fool for thinking there is such a thing as red.
As in, it might be that no person on Earth has such a naive concept of subjective experience, but they are not used to expressing it in language, then when you try to make them express subjective experience in language and/or explain it to them, they say
Oh, that makes no sense, you’re right
Instead of saying:
Oh yeah, I guess I can’t define this concept central to everything about being human after 10 seconds of thinking in more than 1 catchphrase.
But again, what I’m saying above is subjective, please go back and consider my statement regarding language, if we disagree there, then there’s not much to discuss (or the discussion is rather much longer and moves into other areas), because at the end of the day, I literally can not know what your talking about. Maybe I have a vague impression from years of meditation as to what you are referring to...or maybe not, maybe whatever you had in your experience is much more different and we are discussing two completely different things, but since we are very vague when referring to them, we think we have a disagreement in what we see, when instead we’re just looking in completely different places.
No? I am trying to point you to something in your subjective experience, exactly because it is something that exists in your experience, and which seems like an integral part of how minds are organized. I’m definitely not going to argue that you are a fool for having it, because by default everyone has it.
But my claim is not “there’s a concept in your experience that you can’t define in words”… I defined it in words in my article! I even explained it in third-person terms, in the sense of “if a computer program made the same mistake, what would be the objectively-verifiable mistake in that.”
I am just saying that while the mistake is perfectly easy to define in third-person terms, I cannot give you a definition that would directly link it up to your first-person experience. Because while words can be used to point at the experience, they cannot define the experience in a way that would create it.
We can see where a computer program that committed this mistake would go wrong, but we do not see ourselves from a third-person perspective, so I cannot give you a third-person explanation that would cause the third-person explanation and the first-person experience to link up directly. But I can suggest ways in which you can examine your first-person experience, and then when you have the third-person explanation, the two can link up.
(Note that I am explicitly deviating from the Buddhist writers who say that it’s intrinsically impossible to understand what’s going on. I get why they are saying that: the Buddhists of old didn’t know about computers or simulations, so they didn’t have a third-person framework in which the thing can be explained. But we do, and that’s why I’ve explicitly given you the third-person framework, or at least tried to.)
A person who is shown red for the first time could also say “oh, right, that’s red; you’re right that I couldn’t have defined it in words”, but unlike your comment suggests, the “I couldn’t have defined it in words” isn’t the important part of the “oh”. The important part is “oh, now I can assign a meaning to your sentence in a way that causes its odd syntax to make sense, and now I can think more clearly about what something like ‘seeing red’ means”.
If I may ask, how much time did you spend actually following the suggestions in the post and trying to find what the thing that I’m pointing at?
It’s certainly not “literally impossible”. Some are lucky enough to find it the moment they are pointed towards it. Others may have difficulty, and of course, given the fact that human minds vary and some people lack universal experiences, I cannot disprove the possibility that there could some people who naturally lack this experience at all.
But I do expect that most people can find it—maybe it takes a minute, maybe ten, maybe a year, I have no idea of what the average and the median here might be. But you have to actually try looking for it.