badger3k

Since I'm still at work (last day of summer school! - even if I have to stay two hours after all the kids have left - boo - but I get paid - yay!) so I have limited access (truthfully, I am amazed I can get to this site). I'll have to check it out later at home - probably tomorrow - have puppy training class. I've looked into near-death experiences (was a big woo-dog in my earlier years) and so far, when looked at with an objective eye as I can achieve, the evidence is very lacking. We have known physiological mechanisms that can account for the "visions" and other things that have been reported, and even the simple fact that people's near death experiences conform to their prior cultural or religious beliefs is indicative of a mental creation due to anoxia and our brains desire to make sense (and memories) of things.

If I was at home I could probably give a few links or put some files on my webpage - if I am able to I will put that up and post it here.

I'm open to a scientific investigation of the matter, but if all you have are assertions, then I'll more than likely have to pass. But I'll still take a look later.

trendkill

Well, since I didn't do that, I'm at a loss as to why it's relevant.

Irrelevant, I never said anything about pain.

Well, the thing is, we know the knife imparts information to your brain whether you're a p-zombie or not, because the body responds to it the same either way. The example is designed to demonstrate that that information is necessarily relevant to the qualia. Once we admit this, the only open question is how deep down into the regress of explanations that relevance goes. If it goes all the way down, there is no hard problem, because in that case, the information processing (which nobody disputes the existence of) turns out to be identical to the qualia of the experience. To say that the zombie processes the information from the knife in the same way as the sentient human does is the same thing as saying that it is not a zombie at all. If this turns out to be the case, p-zombies aren't just unlikely, they're logically impossible. And if p-zombies are logically impossible, then it follows that there is no explanatory gap and no hard problem.

So, the conclusion is that we must consider the possibility that p-zombies are necessarily nonexistent, which is the same thing as saying that there is no hard problem. We just need more information, which is why it is not proven yet, but the point is that you can't disprove it yet either, and thus there is no basis for asserting that there is a hard problem.

No, it arises from the pillow being in contact with more of your hand, which is stipulated. Whether you see it or not is irrelevant; the example works exactly the same with a blind man.


If your hand is destroyed by fire and you feel no change, that seems to mean you weren't feeling your hand in the first place. It's the difference between sensing and hallucinating that is key here. Returning to the knife example--the question is whether the information that comes from physical contact with the knife is sufficient to determine a particular set of qualia, given a particular sentient being with which it comes in contact. This requires that the information from the knife actually gets through to the brain, which is another way of saying that the knife is sensed accurately.

Sure, there is no logical conflict between cutting your hand with a knife and feeling a soft pillow on it at the same time, but if this happens, you're not really sensing the knife. The qualia are so disconnected to the outside world that they almost aren't related to the knife at all. E.g. the knife is going into your skin, but you're not feeling anything go in; instead, you're feeling a soft surface pressing against a relatively large area of your hand. The sensation of a soft pillow is inconsistent with the behavior of the knife. There appears to be a discrepancy between accurately processing the information imparted by sharp or hard objects and the generation of soft qualia.

This doesn't make any sense to me. The relevant definition of a brute fact is that it has no explanation; it simply is. Trying to explain a brute fact's "bruteness" would be pointless.

Well, if you're saying that scientists aren't investigating the problems of consciousness, that's just ridiculous. It sounds like you've assumed your conclusion again; of course, scientists working on the easy problems is not even approaching the problem if the problem is hard. But of course many of them do not believe there is a hard problem; they think they are on the track to explaining consciousness because they expect that all the problems are "easy".

This is a really bizarre claim which I think I've seen before; it seems to suggest that, say, Daniel Dennett doesn't have first-person experiences, because if he did, he'd agree with you. Which is doubly absurd when you throw in epiphenomenalism because, if epiphenomenalism is true, experiential evidence has no effect on what happens in someone's brain anyway. The idea that you do things because of what you experience is an illusion in that case. You do things because of blind mechanistic forces; the evidence is qualitative and thus has no power to affect anything physical, so having experiences couldn't possibly make any difference in how you think.

Lekatt

The physiological mechanisms that science says account for the visions is only theory, not provable facts. What mechanisms would be able to explain a blind person being able to see while unconscious and out of body. That is on the video.

Apostate1970

subjective idealism (SI) is not solipsism. it does not deny the reality of material objects and it does not deny the reality of an other-than-self or an external world. in fact, it would have to maintain that solipsism narrowly construed is totally indefensible or even incoherent since any possible experience of a self can only be had in conjunction with experiences of things that are not self. put another way, solipsism requires that you see/feel things that you rightly attribute to being your body or as under own control without also experiencing things that you do not attribute to your body or out of your control. but none of us ever do this and it seems likely that we couldn't do this... that there could be no concept of self without a concept of other.

the only distinction that SI has to make is between the sort of knowledge that we have when we have immediate and direct awareness of our own current experience, and the sort of knowledge that we have when we conjecture or inquire about how our anticipated future experience might turn out.

http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&r...ctive+idealism

one view that is closely connected to subjective idealism but which connection i think is not usually pointed out is anything along the lines of Leibnizian monadism.

Lekatt

You can only understand who you are through feelings. There are places the intellect is inferior. I took philosophy as a minor in school, but found that naming something is not understanding it.