Tani

what is that reason you speak of other than that you have direct access to your own mind?

and just one thing, to the best of our knowledge to date, we have absolutely nothing on consciousness, to assume that it is grounded on physical structures is merely a convinence. there is still the the problem that you simply can't observe perceptions - which you agreed - which is the true matter of contention.

the way you apply occam's razor does not help at all on this issue, for as we already agreed on this single immense problem: we have no possible way to compare data. it might be of instrumental benifits to assume other senses the same, but that's not what the original question is about.

edit: just to make it clear, the way you apply occam's razor helps you to select an explanation with the best likelihood, and if i were to do the same, it helps me to select an explanation with the best likelihood, too, but just what does it all mean if we can't even compare our results? how do you even apply occam's razor on the issue, as in it being independent from your perceptions? (what we need is that they are all the same, not that they are all the same as yours.) the lack of data is not a basis for using occam's razor.

Purr

Yay! I've thought about the same thing for SO long. You said it much better than I would though!

I've always wondered what the world would look like if we all saw different colors. Like, the grass is green and everyone knows that, but what if "green" to Godot is really what I see as purple? The grass and trees would be purple if I could see what he's seeing.

DRFseven

Hmm, to me, it seems most likely we experience colors differently, just as we experience pain and taste differently.

copernicus

DRFseven, we might tolerate pain differently, and we might acquire affinities and dislikes for different tastes, but that does not mean that we experience the pains and tastes differently from a subjective point of view.

Missing from this discussion is the difference between "active" and "passive" perception. We do not really experience raw sense data in a "passive" sense. Rather, the human mind imposes as cognitive template or filter on sensory data. Hence, if one were to wear glasses that made all visual sensory data "upside down", the brain would compensate for that data by converting the sensory input to "rightside up" interpretation. In other words, we don't really experience sensory data, we interpret it. All experience is run through an interpretive mental filter. This entire discussion is predicated on the false premise that we experience unmediated sensations. Not true.

Tani

ok, instead of seeing blue, we can call it blue-seeing, that still doesn't answer the question though. it doesn't bridge the gap between something physical (photons moving in a particular wave length) to something mental (seeing blue/blue-seeing). the problem here is that we have absolutely no access to the 1st peron data on those experiences - we can't observe the 1st person data in the 3rd person. the problem with identifying "seeing blue," or "blue-seeing" if you like, with a particular brain state is that instead of saying i see blue, you'll be saying my brain sees blue, or the physio-chemical in my brain sees blue, or those electron sees blue, it still begs the question in the end. without being able to even establishing what i see, you'd have nothing to even compare with, much less claiming what i see is what you see.

a8o

Learning a new language. I have often also wondered what it would be like if my first language was German rather than English and not the other way round. If I was learning English instead of German at this point of time, would I be ahead in my studies of it - English seems so easy for me to interpret since my brain is conditioned to understand it, however, some German pronounciation is difficult for my tongue to artiulate due to muscle differences.

That is to debate the issue that our 'equipment' is all similar. We agree that the organs of articulation are almost identical, but have been conditioned to function in the way that has become natural to them. What I propose is that the eyes and brain have become used to 'seeing' the world in a particular way and thus any other function seems incredible.

DRFseven

Well, if one person reports something, such as being cut, as being painful, while another reports it as feeling good, why does that not mean the subjective experience is different?

Of course, but we still don't know what it's like to be a bat or even another human besides ourselves. Intuitively, it seems experiences must necessarily seem somewhat alike, but the intuition could be off base.

copernicus

That doesn't express what I said, and I'm not sure that you understood my point at all. All I said was that the mind adds structure to sensory input. The context in which you view objects can cause you to perceive the same wavelength as different colors. We are all familiar with optical illusions, and we know that they are produced by the central nervous system, not the peripheral one.

Again, the difference is in the central nervous system, not the muscular system. Exposure to English has programmed your brain to coordinate articulation during speech in a certain way. When you are not trying to "speak", you can easily mimic any foreign sound that you have difficulty speaking. The great American linguist Edward Sapir once wrote a paper in which he marveled at the physical similarity between the Southern Paiute voiceless bilabial fricative--difficult to pronounce as a speech sound for most English speakers--and blowing out a candle. When you speak, an entirely different mental program takes over the coordination of articulatory muscles.

Perhaps I should have been clearer in what I meant. Obviously, we all have different experiences, but there are qualitative and quantitative differences. I would say that you are talking about quantitative differences, whereas this thread is more about qualitatively different experiences for the same stimuli, e.g. consistently experiencing "blueness" where someone else experiences "redness". In the case of pain, people may tolerate the same stimulus more or less differently, but that does not mean that the actual experience of pain is qualitatively different for those people.

Agreed. Richard Dawkins did a marvelous job of comparing human vision to a bat's sonar in The Blind Watchmaker. However, those experiences are vicarious. I am not arguing that we can ever know that our qualitative experiences are identical with those of others. However, we are jumping to unwarranted conclusions when we ignore the fact that humans experience qualitatively different mental states with the same physical equipment. Physically similar humans aren't any more likely to experience colors differently than physically similar cameras are likely to produce different colors in pictures. It is simple sophistry to debate this issue without some reasonable theory of mental states to back it up.

Tani

i understood what you meant. what i was trying to say is that you seems to have jump to the otherside without bridging the gap - it begs the question. it really boils down to the mind-body problem. without being able to explain the casual relation between the the brain state and the mind, you will be always jumping to conclusion by leaping the mind-body gap. don't get me wrong, i always assume others see blue the way as i do. it is indeed of immense intrumental convinence to assume that, but that doesn't answer the question.