Pattern-chaser wrote: ↑December 11th, 2021, 1:24 pmScience cannot magically transform something subjective into something objective, any more than it can transform metal into wood. "Ye canna change the laws of physics, Captain!"
Subjective experiential occurrents can non-magically result from constellations of objective nonexperiential occurrents.
(I mean the identity-entailing
resultance of a whole
through composition or constitution rather than nonidentity-entailing emergence.)
Your experiences are subjective or private in the sense that I cannot experience them. They are
experientially inaccessible to me; but it doesn't follow that they are also
perceptually inaccessible to me
from the external perspective. For if your subjective experiences are complexes of objective occurrences in your brain, I can externally perceive them as such (with the help of neuroimaging technology). Of course, there is still a (numerical&qualitative) difference between
your internal experiencing of an experience and
my external perceiving of your experience (as a neural process).
QUOTE>
"[W]hat of the objective-subjective divide? You are, it would seem, privy to your own experiences in a way no one else could be. Experiences are private, unobservable in principle from the outside. In contrast, goings-on inside your body, including goings-on in your brain, are, at least in principle, observable by anyone with the right equipment. It is all well and good to suppose your experience of a red tomato is
correlated with an occurrence in your nervous system. A neuroscientist might observe and measure your experience’s neural correlate, the state that, presumably, ‘gives rise’ to your experience. But it makes no sense to imagine a neuroscientist’s observing your experience.
Comfortable there in the fly-bottle? Think about it. What exactly would it be for a scientist to
observe your experience? If we are careful to distinguish the qualities of what is experienced, the redness of a tomato, for instance, from qualities of the experience, it would be a mistake to expect a scientist observing your experience of a red tomato to observe something red and tomato-shaped. This opens the door to the possibility that your experiencing the tomato is an occurrence in your brain that could in fact be observed by others. Describing brain processes as correlates of experiences is just another time-honored way of stacking the deck.
What, then, accounts for the powerful sense that experiences are distinctively private affairs? Undeniably, there is a difference between something’s
being in a particular state and
observations of something’s being in that state. Suppose your undergoing a particular conscious experience is for your brain to be in a particular state. Now, imagine a neuroscientist’s observing your brain’s being in that state. The neuroscientist’s observing your brain state is itself a matter of the neuroscientist’s being in a distinct experiential state.
What reason is there to imagine that the neuroscientist’s experience of your experience of a red tomato should resemble your experience of a red tomato or, more generally, that a neuroscientist’s observation of a conscious state could yield an awareness of ‘what it is like’ to be in that state, whatever the state? Observing a state reveals what
the state is like, not what it is like to
be in the state. Assuming that it makes sense to identify experiences with neurological states or processes, undergoing and observing the undergoing of an experience are chalk and cheese.
What of the elusive ‘what-it’s-like-ness’ of experiences? All sides agree that knowing what it is like to experience red requires having visually experienced something red. The point is a perfectly general epistemological point having nothing in particular to do with experiential qualities. Knowing what an echidna is like requires encountering an echidna, or pictures or descriptions of echidnas, or creatures you know to be echidna-like.
At the risk of adding a distracting complication, I feel obliged to insert a caveat here. Suppose, as I have suggested, that in hallucinating something red or experiencing a red after-image you are in a state that qualitatively resembles the corresponding veridical state. If you could go into such a state without having previously gone into the corresponding veridical state, then you could, in principle anyway, know what it is like to experience something red without ever actually having experienced anything red. At any rate, you would have the raw materials required for such knowledge. Whether you would be in a position to make the requisite judgment is another matter.
None of this should be seen as especially controversial. If your visually experiencing a tomato or suffering a painful experience is a matter of your being in a particular state, a scientist’s experiencing that state, visually, for instance, is a matter of the scientist’s being in a particular state. These states, yours and the scientist’s, need not be similar, qualitatively or otherwise, in fact it would be astonishing if they were. If knowing what it is like to be in a particular state requires being in, or having been in it that state, knowing what it is like to experience a tomato visually differs from knowing what it is like to experience a visual experience of a tomato.
The subjectivity of experiences stems, not from their in-principle unobservability from the outside, but from the relatively humdrum distinction between something’s being in a particular state and someone’s observing that state. The distinction applies to mental and nonmental phenomena alike. A quantity of water’s being in a liquid state is one thing, your observing the water’s being in that state something else altogether.
Please do not imagine that I am asking you to embrace yet another implausible theory of the mind. I am not asking you to embrace any theory at all. What I am urging is just that you come to see as optional theses that have led to our languishing in the fly-bottle: ‘the fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars, but in ourselves’."
(Heil, John.
Appearance in Reality. New York: Oxford University Press, 2021. pp. 109-10)
<QUOTE