Can you give me an example of how, even in principle, this would work? Construct a toy universe in which there are experiences causally determined by non-experiences. How would examining anything about the non-experiences tell us that the experiences exist, or what particular way those experiences feel?
It sounds like you’re asking me to do what I just asked you to do. I don’t know what experiences are, except by listing synonyms or by acts of brute ostension — hey, check out that pain! look at that splotch of redness! — so if I could taboo them away, it would mean I’d already solved the hard problem. This may be an error mode of ‘tabooing’ itself; that decision procedure, applied to our most primitive and generic categories (try tabooing ‘existence’ or ‘feature’), seems to either yield uninformative lists of examples, implausible eliminativisms (what would a world without experience, without existence, or without features, look like?), or circular definitions.
But what happens when we try to taboo a term is just more introspective data; it doesn’t give us any infallible decision procedure, on its own, for what conclusion we should draw from problem cases. To assert ‘if you can’t taboo it, then it’s meaningless!’, for example, is itself to commit yourself to a highly speculative philosophical and semantic hypothesis.
Taboo experiences.
It sounds like you’re asking me to do what I just asked you to do. I don’t know what experiences are, except by listing synonyms or by acts of brute ostension — hey, check out that pain! look at that splotch of redness! — so if I could taboo them away, it would mean I’d already solved the hard problem. This may be an error mode of ‘tabooing’ itself; that decision procedure, applied to our most primitive and generic categories (try tabooing ‘existence’ or ‘feature’), seems to either yield uninformative lists of examples, implausible eliminativisms (what would a world without experience, without existence, or without features, look like?), or circular definitions.
But what happens when we try to taboo a term is just more introspective data; it doesn’t give us any infallible decision procedure, on its own, for what conclusion we should draw from problem cases. To assert ‘if you can’t taboo it, then it’s meaningless!’, for example, is itself to commit yourself to a highly speculative philosophical and semantic hypothesis.