Re: Original Sin

On Dec 18, 5:01 am, Gareth McCaughan <Gareth.McCaug...@xxxxxxxxx>
wrote:
[ Gareth ]
I was saying that a sufficiently detailed third-person description
of what's happening when the experience is had could suffice to
answer the question "what is it like?".

Yes, you have said that before, that's what I took issue with on the
understanding that 'what is it like' means 'how does it feel' or 'how
to describe the experience of, from a first hand experiencing pov'.

Right. (Of course it would be question-begging to *assume*
that answering "how does it feel?" has to involve actually
feeling it.

I'm not *so* sure as you appear to be that it is indeed 'begging the
question'. It all depends on how we interpret 'how does it feel'. Or
perhaps this has arisen because the question has been split off from
'..to be Dianelos'. I'm sure that to answer the question 'what is it
like to be Dianelos' then we've got to compare (that's what 'like'
means in this instance) something with the being. And the 'being' here
means the feeling, not just in the sense of emotional state but all
other senses too. How does it feel, for example, to have a phantom
limb ?

Implausible, too; a good novelist or playwright
ought to be able to give a pretty good account of how something
feels without having experienced it.)

All hinges on what is meant by 'pretty good account' - I've touched on
this aspect in another part of the thread, where you were having
discussion with Simon. Some forms of words evoke the experience within
us better than others - are we to take 'pretty good account'
statistically, that out of a sample of readers, most will agree that
certain feelings have been evoked in them ? Its all rather tricky
stuff :-)

That would only be the same
as saying that a sufficiently detailed third-person description
would be the same as having the experience if I thought that the
only way to answer the question "what is it like?" would be to
have the experience; the whole point is that I don't think that.

Yes, so you *are* admitting that its possible in your view to know
what something *feels like* via only third-person description.

"Admitting"? What an odd choice of word. Anyway, I'm not exactly
claiming that it *is* possible, only that I know of no reason to
think that in principle it couldn't be. Whether it's actually
possible for us, given our mental and technological limitations,
is another question entirely.

The 'principle' as I see it is that experience is the container for
analysis - that all analysis necessarily takes place in the 'arena' of
experience. So if there is a 'principle' it would be something like
'you can't fit a quart into a pint pot' - the container always has to
be larger than the thing contained within it. But that doesn't seem
quite right. I'm having difficulty coming up with a 'principle' which
applies - the problem being turning something obvious in terms of
insight into a form of words. I'm fairly sure its not a mental or
technical limitation, unless you mean by 'mental' limitation a
limitation enforced by only having the MUI available to us (since
AFAIK you don't subscribe to that ontology, I doubt you mean that).

And
that's what I take issue with. So we do still fundamentally disagree
and you are still conflating the map with the territory :-) Why I
think this happens in your case is that your thoughts strongly
influence your feelings, so its a normal experience for you to get an
emotional response from thinking something. You get (experience)
crosstalk between the two realms which are in reality distinct.
Doubtless you'll disagree, and may even strongly object to my taking
this discussion into the realms of psychoanalysis :-)

Dunno about "strongly object", but it seems as futile as ever.
(And, for what it's worth, your guesses about how my mind works
seem as hopeless as ever too, though as always it's possible
that your guesswork is more accurate than my introspection.)

I'm basing my guesses here on my own experience :-)

OK, I'm not saying that it couldn't. I can't see how it could at the
moment, but to me it would really be hubris to rule it out. I'd really
like to know how it is that the qualia of 'blueness' could be shown to
be derived from the mechanics of brain and eye operations but I don't
know how it could at the moment. So it seems we're not in disgreement
here.

I'm leaving the above in simply because I don't understand how
it's consistent with your objections above.

It could be that I wrote it in response to a misunderstanding of your
own position. I did think, for a while, that you weren't saying what I
thought you were saying at the outset, but on further discussion it
seems that you were. If you think that 'understanding how something
arises' is the same as 'experiencing something' then that could be why
I'm confusing you :-) Or another possibility is that I misunderstood
the referent for 'it' in the first sentence. I note that lower down
you're discussing about 'understanding' so that might be the next nub
of contention.

Splendid. Dianelos, on the other hand, combines a robust belief
in the sufficiency of third-person, scientific, analysis to
account for everything that's objectively observable, with an
equally robust belief that experience is fundamentally inaccessible
to such analysis. I find this odd. I think he finds it odd that
I find it odd. Perhaps we'll understand one another better
eventually...

Well it depends how far you think experience can be analysed. Since
its analysis, not experience, then no amount of analysis will *ever*
give rise to experience.

(Except in so far as, at least for us humans, there is such
a thing as the experience of analysing something. But that's
irrelevant.)

Well maybe its not so irrelevant. Analysis takes place within
experience, and it seems you don't believe that analysis does give
rise to experience. So for you, there's some (to me mysterious) third
way - that analysis can somehow stand in place of experience - that
you can know 'what is it like to be' without actually being. I'm
scratching around rather here - does the 'being' happen
contemporaneously with the analysis for you ? Or does the analysis
stop, then you have some intuition as a result of that analysis of
'what its like' ? Or don't you know because this is just something
you're arguing for in principle ?

Analysis is third party, experience is first
party. No amount of analysis of how the qualia of 'blueness' will give
me the experience of 'blueness' but I don't dispute that analysis can
help shed light on how such experience arises. I hope it does, its a
fascinating area of study. So on refection, I'm closer to Dianelos'
position than you appear to think I am. You think my distinction of
analysis from experience is based on an axiom, however I hold no such
axiom, its just not in my experience that such things aren't distinct.

I'm not objecting to a distinction between analysis and experience,
and as I've already said I'm not suggesting that any amount of
analysis of an experience is *the same as* having the experience.
Only that in principle it could be *as effective in producing
understanding* as having the experience.

That is certainly getting clearer. So let's spend some time batting
around this idea of 'understanding' - I take it that understanding is
an experience. And that understanding is distinct from analysis. How I
interpret what you're saying, FWIW, is that digesting some analysis
gives rise in you a satisfying feeling of 'getting something',
something like 'the penny dropping' or an 'aha moment'. Am I on the
right track here ?

Since the circumstances in which I suggest it might be so are
very far removed from any we've had to date -- requiring great
advances in technology, neurology, psychology, etc., and quite
possibly superintelligence -- I don't think the fact that in
your (and my) experience analysis not only isn't the same as
experience but doesn't provide all the same information and
understanding is much evidence against anything I'm saying.

Well I agree its not evidence against what you're saying. Its just
words we (Dianelos and I) are saying. If I had evidence, I'd put it
up, but I have none :-)

As for your understanding Dianelos - it all depends on your intention.

I'm not sure what you mean by that. I certainly intend to
understand what he says (and, so far as required for that,
Dianelos himself) as well as I can given the limits of my
time, brainpower, etc.

Well what I meant is that if you maintain the intention to understand
for long enough, you will succeed in understanding him. Not
necessarily agree with him, but really grok where he's coming from.

Sorry, I wasn't clear enough. I didn't mean 'salamanders have no
experiences' (I think they do), rather I meant we, being human, have
no salamander-experiences to refer to.

Oh, I see. Indeed we don't, but then I have no Dianelos-experiences
to refer to either. The question is how much mileage we can get
from such similarities as there are.

Oh, I didn't think that was the question at all. I think we *are* able
to get a lot of mileage from similarities - otherwise we'd not find
reading novels as satisfying as we do for example. My purpose in
introducing the salamander was to decouple this aspect (that of humans
having similar experiences which I take as axiomatic) from the
question I thought you were posing, which was rather about the
adequacy of descriptions of experience.

Richard
.

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