A human mind is a physical object in the universe, mine as well as yours. An experience that you have should not produce a qualitatively different update in beliefs to an experience I report. In either case, the fact of the matter is, on such and such date and time, a human brain under such and such circumstances underwent such and such experiences.
To take it to an extreme case, no one has access to information which a scientist with a super-MRI machine observing the excitation of each individual neuron does not, in principle, have.
Yes, of course—but I don’t have a super-MRI. I can’t access the content of my friends’ experiences; I can’t take it into account the way I could entertain a communicable proposition, because they can’t even describe their experiences. If someone tells me a piece of evidence that would be excellent evidence for proposition P, but they say it in Swahili, I have no such evidence for P.
A human mind is a physical object in the universe, mine as well as yours. An experience that you have should not produce a qualitatively different update in beliefs to an experience I report. In either case, the fact of the matter is, on such and such date and time, a human brain under such and such circumstances underwent such and such experiences.
To take it to an extreme case, no one has access to information which a scientist with a super-MRI machine observing the excitation of each individual neuron does not, in principle, have.
Yes, of course—but I don’t have a super-MRI. I can’t access the content of my friends’ experiences; I can’t take it into account the way I could entertain a communicable proposition, because they can’t even describe their experiences. If someone tells me a piece of evidence that would be excellent evidence for proposition P, but they say it in Swahili, I have no such evidence for P.