Check out Pete Mandik and Lance Bush's response to this video here: th-cam.com/users/liveQOTT7gKgk5E?si=u1jDwUF8rNV4GpAz and also the brief discussion between Nathan Ormond and I here (full video linked in description): th-cam.com/video/xsU2-tqY0p4/w-d-xo.html
A few months ago a popular atheist debate bro made a satiracal argument of "the hard problem of digestion." The whole thing was asinine and I was in the comments trying to argue that it was purely rhetorical equivocating and question-begging. My descriptions of my pretty remedial understanding of what the general state of field is and why it's still widely regarded as a "hard problem" even amongst illusionists, were met with derision to the field of Philosophy in general and the sentiment of "you're just using fancy words to obfuscate common sense." Crazy how some people in the skeptic space seem to talk just like creationists when they hit a little bit of cognitive dissonance.
Have you seen Kane B’s video about the hard problem of everything? I think he makes a decent case that we could very easily make starting assumptions such that any explanatory project could appear to face a hard problem. What is it that makes one case pure rhetorical equivocation and question-begging and another not?
@@realSAPERE_AUDE To be fair, the video is only about that there will always be a hard problem with every *scientific* explanatory project, not all explanatory projects. He does so with the example of a scientific explanation of how aesthetic impression impact our mind, so basically hes merely restating the explanatory gap between subjective and objective (in the PoM sense) - which is, of course, the hard problem back again. I therefore think insofar as what Kane was getting at in the video, that if the attempt of reducing digestion to the physical would also include the quality of how digestion *feels* when one feels it, that then yes, there would be a hard problem there too, and it would be analogous if not identical to the hard problem of consciousness, and the reductive explanatory project failed. But if one excludes the qualitative aspect for pragmatic reasons or because the scope of the explanation simply didnt include it, that then the two would be disanalogous. In the case of talking about consciousness, however, one cannot exclude the qualitative aspects of the phenomenon, as that is what makes up the entirety of the question in the first place, and any explanation attempt that would not adress that would simply be entirely missing the point
Yeah that's very dumb. It's also not even original -- there was a Nautilus article called The Hard Problem of Breakfast that made the same point. I actually like those kind of arguments, because in my view they *highlight* the disanalogy with phenomenal consciousness, not diminish it. They're actually helping the non-physicalist explain why consciousness is a unique phenomenon!
@@DesertEagel1995 we could argue about how loosely Kane is using terms like scientific description and what counts as that but then we would be missing the point. Either way it’s analogous to the hard problem of consciousness. Take for example Kane’s case of a hard problem of liquidity regarding water. Why is it that the underlying microstructure of H2O molecules constitutes the manifest property of liquidity?
Haha thank you. This kind of topic attracts quietists and illusionists like moths to a light, so it makes sense that their views would seem somewhat overrepresented in the comments.
@EmersonGreen I suppose within that, to the person with the condition it feels like their mind is no longer private even though others can't hear the same things. There is even a symptom known as thought broadcasting where the person is convinced others can read their mind. I'm not sure what I'm trying to say, I'd need to watch the video again. I have the condition and am curious about any philosophical issues it raises. Kind of the main disturbing issue about the whole illness is the lack of mental privacy and having live-in critics who certainly feel like separate people. Great channel btw
How do we know there are “feelings themselves” as opposed to “indicators of feelings” which many people are in some sense trained to interpret as “feelings themselves” such that they can become automatic cognitive processes?
I'm not sure how to answer. Do you see no distinction between the feeling of pain on the one hand and the physical indicators -- crying out, for example -- on the other?
@ yes feeling pain is different from behaviors like crying out. I also think that physiological sensations in general are different from the behavior of interpreting them such that we are aware of them. For you to be aware of pain, you’ve already utilized inherently public means-language and other dynamics you’ve been trained into throughout your development-in order to be meaningfully aware of it. I think I want to say that before this sort of training/development takes place, you don’t have experiences that are like what you and I know as pain. I’d have to think about it more but I want to say that in early development, feeling sensations you and I know as pain is a sort of controlled cognitive process and then as we develop and learn more about linking what we feel to language and tell ourselves stories about our ‘inner world’ these cognitive processes-in most cases, via typical neurology and developmental conditions-become automatic over time.
Mental privacy is not fundamental. We have mental privacy because getting direct access to another person's brain is impractical. It's theoretically possible, but not useful. In reality we approximate the feelings of others using mirror neurons and displaying emotions. If a baby cries, I feel unhappy like the baby. Or if I see someone get hurt, I wince and try to help. Are the experiences the same? No. But they're close enough to be useful. We all develop similarly, so we probably have similar experiences, but they're probably not the same. The mistake you make here is assuming mental privacy is fundamental, not just a matter of practicality. This is an error you make in a lot of your arguments: you appeal to intuition. You feel like you know yourself so well. You feel like your experience is irreducible. You feel like your experiences are fundamentally private. These are all feelings we have, but feelings are fallible. Just go by the evidence, and only use your intuition as a heuristic.
There are two kinds of "can't." There is the kind of "can't" that represents our current limitations due to the means we have immediately available, while on the other hand we have the kind of "can't" that represents the rules of our cosmos. An example of the first would be that we can't go to Alpha Centauri. An example of the second would be that we can't go faster than the speed of light, or you can't be a married bachelor. We might call these a soft can't and a hard can't. Someone probably could get to Alpha Centauri in the far future with enough effort and resources and time, but it is beyond the means of any of us, so it's a soft "can't." Obviously we can't look into other people's heads and see through their eyes, but is this a soft can't or a hard can't? Claiming that this is a soft can't seem pretty trivial. It's fairly obvious to nearly everyone and has no apparent interesting implications for physicalism. Physicalists would most likely say that even though we obviously can't do it *yet,* with sufficiently advanced technology there is no reason why it wouldn't be possible in the far future. There's nothing physically preventing it; it is merely beyond our current means. On the other hand, a hard can't seems like a major problem for physicalism, but the video did not present any arguments that suggested a hard can't. All the arguments of the video seemed entirely consistent with privacy merely being an issue of our current means and technology. The absence of those means and technology is easily established. The *impossibility* of those means and technology is not so easily established.
No, my arguments directly address this. If you think it's a "soft can't", then you must think science could potentially advance to a point where the evidence for my mind would be equal to the evidence for the minds of others, and I'd have to reject the asymmetry. But if you think you'll always have at least slightly more evidence for the existence of your own mind than other minds, then you have to accept mental privacy. That's what my argument was about. So do you think the evidence could ever be such that you have equal justification for the existence of your mind and the minds of others? If not, then the asymmetry argument works.
@@EmersonGreen : Right, in _the future_ we may have brain scanning technology and total understanding of how brains generate consciousness to that we will be able to directly observe the consciousness of other people as surely as we observe a tree outside. Then, when we have that technology, there would no longer be asymmetry. The existence of current asymmetry is irrelevant to that speculative future lack of asymmetry, and the video seemed entirely focused on establishing current asymmetry.
@Ansatz66 Okay, so you’re just biting the Georges Rey bullet then. It’s a free country 🤷 I address this at 7:18 and 7:42 - you stand in a direct relation to your experiences, a relation that I necessarily cannot stand in (as I am not you), with or without futuristic technology. I understand that you’re talking about the future, not the present. I figured some people would say something like this, which is why I addressed it in the video. Again, you’re free to bite the Rey bullet if you like.
In the video, I said “because they are my experiences, I’m in a different position with respect to them than you are *or ever could be*.” I’m making a necessary truth claim there: your experiences are never going to be my experiences. The Rey bullet, as I’m calling it, is the view that one could have equal evidence for the existence of their own mind and the minds of others. Rey thinks this is currently the case, that we have equal evidence now. You may disagree with that, but you’re arguing that it *could* be the case; it’s just a matter of building the right microscope (or something). I said that even if such technology exists someday, it will not dissolve the boundary between my mind and your mind. Even if, thanks to this tech, we both have experiences of identical character, there would still be two experiences: my experience and your experience. Your experiences would not somehow become mine via the right technology. I just can’t get at your experiences and become directly acquainted with your token experience in the way you are. That’s a necessary truth. I drew attention to Rey’s position because I think it’s irrational, but not just because we don’t have the right brain-scanner yet! I don’t think the problem of other minds can be solved just by looking through the right microscope.
@@EmersonGreen : It seems a failure of Rey's imagination that he is unable to contemplate that other people might be some sort of sophisticated puppet. Despite how fantastical that possibility might be, clearly each person is in a better position to determine that they are not a puppet than to determine that other people are not puppets, until some future time when we may be able to scan the workings of other people's brains and see that a conscious experience really is happening in there. "You may disagree with that, but you’re arguing that it could be the case; it’s just a matter of building the right microscope (or something)." Right, exactly. By all indications our minds are analogous to a process happening on a computer, but with neurological signals in a brain instead of electronic signals in an integrated circuit. We can clearly see that our brains are vastly complex signal-processing mechanisms, so the most plausible conclusion is plain, even if we cannot yet prove it due to our lack of full understanding of the mechanism. We should expect that once we have that understanding then minds will be as easily manipulated as computer software, and consciousness will no longer be private. "I said that even if such technology exists someday, it will not dissolve the boundary between my mind and your mind." That is easy to say, but not so easy to support with reasons, and saying that it is necessarily true is not a reason.
Mental events are events happening in the world or in reality, so in that sense they are as public as any other event. In principle, they are equally accessible. Our epistemic limitations or our current epistemic access mean nothing beyond that. There is an unjustified leap from they are contingently private to they are necessarily private. Otherwise, the argument just presupposes they are necessarily private, i.e., it goes in circles. What would it even mean for mental events to be necessarily private? Like aren't those events happening out there in public objective reality?
It seems to me you are confusing the ways in which "subjective/objective" are used in on one hand epistemology, and the other hand philosophy of mind. In the sense of the former, of course it is a objectively true that the quality of red looks to you as it does, whereas in the sense of the latter, subjective only means that something is within first person experience - like qualities of conscious states, and so on. That does not mean that I can know, from my first person view, how experiencing pain feels like to you. Would you disagree?
@DesertEagel1995 I disagree with the suggestion that it is necessarily the case that mental events are private. They are happening in reality just like other events. If other events like physical events are not necessarily private, what makes mental events so? Are they magically disconnected from the rest of reality or what? It makes no sense whatsoever to me. After all the mental events are accesible to its owner. There is nothing about the mind itself that logically precludes access to it. If so, what obstacle is there to another subject having access? All this video appeals to are some contingent truths.
@@EmersonGreen In addition, I pointed that this video doesn't really offer any defense for the proposition that mental events are necessarily private, and I also employed a reductio ad absurdum.
We certainly have introspective faculties regarding our own states that are inaccessible to others (at least without future technology), which creates a kind of asymmetry. But why would this ability be best explained by the supposed infallibility of that faculty? If there are sensors in my body and my introspective faculties use them, it's no surprise others cannot use them, since these sensors are not connected to their bodies. And even if such an infallible faculty were to exist, why would this prevent science from studying these states as usual? Let's imagine God picks a person and grants them unmediated access to the spin of subatomic particles with absolute certainty. Would it prevent us from continuing to do science about spin? No. Spin would remain just as accessible to scientific inquiry as before. So if such an almost magical faculty is a good (even best) explanation of the assymetry, there is no need to equip the state with the kind of science defying privacy qualia supposed to have on the top of that in order to explain the asymmetry.
I don't understand what swinburne means when he says that a brain event isn't an event that anyone has the unique access to of the kind they have to their sensation If a brain event is happening to you then you would have unique access to it in that it is happening to you. On physicalism we would have unique access to our own brain events since our perspective is of them happening to us and everyone else gets the external perspective. You and I can have experiences of the same physical event and gain different knowledge due to the event because we have different perspectives of the event. Happening to me vs not happening to me seems like just a special case of observing from different locations. Watching from here isn't going to tell you everything about what its like to watch from somewhere else.
Anyone with the right training could observe your brain activity, including you. It is not the case that anyone could observe your feelings, intentions, etc.
but they can't observe my brain activity if they can't occupy a position from which they are capable of observing my brain activity My not being able to know exactly what it's like for me to see things from one place by being in another place doesn't seem very different from not being able to know what it's like to be you by not being you, I'm not standing in the right place to experience events the same way. If we could occupy the exact same space we could get the exact same view of a physical event and in the same way if we could occupy the same state we would both experience what it's like to be in the same state. I get the impression that he can only say that views of physical processes aren't exclusive because he's ignoring that each observational perspective isn't an exact match for any another. I feel like if we took all applicable physical appearance details into account then any instance of observational access is unique compared to other perspectives, we don't all have the same access to the same physical events in the same way. It seems like physical events could be considered private under his criteria if it's only physically possible for one perspective to receive information about what happened for whatever reason. Something like quantum state interactions being private because they're only accessible to a single interaction which then changes the state of the system such that the way it was can't subsequently or simultaneously be observed in any other way
If we were both to eat a scoop of ice-cream from the same bucket. Given that each scoop contained exactly the same quantity and type of molecules, one could still argue that they were different molecules. We also have different brain structures so might interpret the taste differently. Is this physically private then? Or is it the qualia that is private?
Check out Pete Mandik and Lance Bush's response to this video here: th-cam.com/users/liveQOTT7gKgk5E?si=u1jDwUF8rNV4GpAz
and also the brief discussion between Nathan Ormond and I here (full video linked in description): th-cam.com/video/xsU2-tqY0p4/w-d-xo.html
@@EmersonGreen ohh I like this addition; respect for promoting productive disagreement
A few months ago a popular atheist debate bro made a satiracal argument of "the hard problem of digestion." The whole thing was asinine and I was in the comments trying to argue that it was purely rhetorical equivocating and question-begging. My descriptions of my pretty remedial understanding of what the general state of field is and why it's still widely regarded as a "hard problem" even amongst illusionists, were met with derision to the field of Philosophy in general and the sentiment of "you're just using fancy words to obfuscate common sense."
Crazy how some people in the skeptic space seem to talk just like creationists when they hit a little bit of cognitive dissonance.
Have you seen Kane B’s video about the hard problem of everything? I think he makes a decent case that we could very easily make starting assumptions such that any explanatory project could appear to face a hard problem. What is it that makes one case pure rhetorical equivocation and question-begging and another not?
@@realSAPERE_AUDE To be fair, the video is only about that there will always be a hard problem with every *scientific* explanatory project, not all explanatory projects.
He does so with the example of a scientific explanation of how aesthetic impression impact our mind, so basically hes merely restating the explanatory gap between subjective and objective (in the PoM sense) - which is, of course, the hard problem back again. I therefore think insofar as what Kane was getting at in the video, that if the attempt of reducing digestion to the physical would also include the quality of how digestion *feels* when one feels it, that then yes, there would be a hard problem there too, and it would be analogous if not identical to the hard problem of consciousness, and the reductive explanatory project failed. But if one excludes the qualitative aspect for pragmatic reasons or because the scope of the explanation simply didnt include it, that then the two would be disanalogous. In the case of talking about consciousness, however, one cannot exclude the qualitative aspects of the phenomenon, as that is what makes up the entirety of the question in the first place, and any explanation attempt that would not adress that would simply be entirely missing the point
Yeah that's very dumb. It's also not even original -- there was a Nautilus article called The Hard Problem of Breakfast that made the same point. I actually like those kind of arguments, because in my view they *highlight* the disanalogy with phenomenal consciousness, not diminish it. They're actually helping the non-physicalist explain why consciousness is a unique phenomenon!
@@DesertEagel1995 we could argue about how loosely Kane is using terms like scientific description and what counts as that but then we would be missing the point. Either way it’s analogous to the hard problem of consciousness. Take for example Kane’s case of a hard problem of liquidity regarding water. Why is it that the underlying microstructure of H2O molecules constitutes the manifest property of liquidity?
@@EmersonGreen why is it very dumb?
noticed there's like no comments agreeing with you. i do, makes a lot sense. seems like privacy is a data that you need to account for
Haha thank you. This kind of topic attracts quietists and illusionists like moths to a light, so it makes sense that their views would seem somewhat overrepresented in the comments.
Could it be that we simply don't have the tools to share qualia yet? And also that we don't really understand qualia?
I address this in the video briefly, but it also came up when Nathan and I spoke about it: th-cam.com/video/xsU2-tqY0p4/w-d-xo.html
What would you all think of voice hearers such as people with schizophrenia?
well I think their qualia are private...what are you asking?
@EmersonGreen I suppose within that, to the person with the condition it feels like their mind is no longer private even though others can't hear the same things.
There is even a symptom known as thought broadcasting where the person is convinced others can read their mind.
I'm not sure what I'm trying to say, I'd need to watch the video again.
I have the condition and am curious about any philosophical issues it raises. Kind of the main disturbing issue about the whole illness is the lack of mental privacy and having live-in critics who certainly feel like separate people.
Great channel btw
How do we know there are “feelings themselves” as opposed to “indicators of feelings” which many people are in some sense trained to interpret as “feelings themselves” such that they can become automatic cognitive processes?
I'm not sure how to answer. Do you see no distinction between the feeling of pain on the one hand and the physical indicators -- crying out, for example -- on the other?
@ yes feeling pain is different from behaviors like crying out. I also think that physiological sensations in general are different from the behavior of interpreting them such that we are aware of them. For you to be aware of pain, you’ve already utilized inherently public means-language and other dynamics you’ve been trained into throughout your development-in order to be meaningfully aware of it. I think I want to say that before this sort of training/development takes place, you don’t have experiences that are like what you and I know as pain. I’d have to think about it more but I want to say that in early development, feeling sensations you and I know as pain is a sort of controlled cognitive process and then as we develop and learn more about linking what we feel to language and tell ourselves stories about our ‘inner world’ these cognitive processes-in most cases, via typical neurology and developmental conditions-become automatic over time.
Mental privacy is not fundamental. We have mental privacy because getting direct access to another person's brain is impractical. It's theoretically possible, but not useful. In reality we approximate the feelings of others using mirror neurons and displaying emotions. If a baby cries, I feel unhappy like the baby. Or if I see someone get hurt, I wince and try to help. Are the experiences the same? No. But they're close enough to be useful. We all develop similarly, so we probably have similar experiences, but they're probably not the same.
The mistake you make here is assuming mental privacy is fundamental, not just a matter of practicality. This is an error you make in a lot of your arguments: you appeal to intuition. You feel like you know yourself so well. You feel like your experience is irreducible. You feel like your experiences are fundamentally private. These are all feelings we have, but feelings are fallible. Just go by the evidence, and only use your intuition as a heuristic.
There are two kinds of "can't." There is the kind of "can't" that represents our current limitations due to the means we have immediately available, while on the other hand we have the kind of "can't" that represents the rules of our cosmos. An example of the first would be that we can't go to Alpha Centauri. An example of the second would be that we can't go faster than the speed of light, or you can't be a married bachelor. We might call these a soft can't and a hard can't. Someone probably could get to Alpha Centauri in the far future with enough effort and resources and time, but it is beyond the means of any of us, so it's a soft "can't."
Obviously we can't look into other people's heads and see through their eyes, but is this a soft can't or a hard can't? Claiming that this is a soft can't seem pretty trivial. It's fairly obvious to nearly everyone and has no apparent interesting implications for physicalism. Physicalists would most likely say that even though we obviously can't do it *yet,* with sufficiently advanced technology there is no reason why it wouldn't be possible in the far future. There's nothing physically preventing it; it is merely beyond our current means.
On the other hand, a hard can't seems like a major problem for physicalism, but the video did not present any arguments that suggested a hard can't. All the arguments of the video seemed entirely consistent with privacy merely being an issue of our current means and technology. The absence of those means and technology is easily established. The *impossibility* of those means and technology is not so easily established.
No, my arguments directly address this. If you think it's a "soft can't", then you must think science could potentially advance to a point where the evidence for my mind would be equal to the evidence for the minds of others, and I'd have to reject the asymmetry. But if you think you'll always have at least slightly more evidence for the existence of your own mind than other minds, then you have to accept mental privacy. That's what my argument was about.
So do you think the evidence could ever be such that you have equal justification for the existence of your mind and the minds of others? If not, then the asymmetry argument works.
@@EmersonGreen : Right, in _the future_ we may have brain scanning technology and total understanding of how brains generate consciousness to that we will be able to directly observe the consciousness of other people as surely as we observe a tree outside. Then, when we have that technology, there would no longer be asymmetry. The existence of current asymmetry is irrelevant to that speculative future lack of asymmetry, and the video seemed entirely focused on establishing current asymmetry.
@Ansatz66 Okay, so you’re just biting the Georges Rey bullet then. It’s a free country 🤷
I address this at 7:18 and 7:42 - you stand in a direct relation to your experiences, a relation that I necessarily cannot stand in (as I am not you), with or without futuristic technology. I understand that you’re talking about the future, not the present. I figured some people would say something like this, which is why I addressed it in the video. Again, you’re free to bite the Rey bullet if you like.
In the video, I said “because they are my experiences, I’m in a different position with respect to them than you are *or ever could be*.” I’m making a necessary truth claim there: your experiences are never going to be my experiences.
The Rey bullet, as I’m calling it, is the view that one could have equal evidence for the existence of their own mind and the minds of others. Rey thinks this is currently the case, that we have equal evidence now. You may disagree with that, but you’re arguing that it *could* be the case; it’s just a matter of building the right microscope (or something). I said that even if such technology exists someday, it will not dissolve the boundary between my mind and your mind. Even if, thanks to this tech, we both have experiences of identical character, there would still be two experiences: my experience and your experience. Your experiences would not somehow become mine via the right technology. I just can’t get at your experiences and become directly acquainted with your token experience in the way you are. That’s a necessary truth.
I drew attention to Rey’s position because I think it’s irrational, but not just because we don’t have the right brain-scanner yet! I don’t think the problem of other minds can be solved just by looking through the right microscope.
@@EmersonGreen : It seems a failure of Rey's imagination that he is unable to contemplate that other people might be some sort of sophisticated puppet. Despite how fantastical that possibility might be, clearly each person is in a better position to determine that they are not a puppet than to determine that other people are not puppets, until some future time when we may be able to scan the workings of other people's brains and see that a conscious experience really is happening in there.
"You may disagree with that, but you’re arguing that it could be the case; it’s just a matter of building the right microscope (or something)."
Right, exactly. By all indications our minds are analogous to a process happening on a computer, but with neurological signals in a brain instead of electronic signals in an integrated circuit. We can clearly see that our brains are vastly complex signal-processing mechanisms, so the most plausible conclusion is plain, even if we cannot yet prove it due to our lack of full understanding of the mechanism. We should expect that once we have that understanding then minds will be as easily manipulated as computer software, and consciousness will no longer be private.
"I said that even if such technology exists someday, it will not dissolve the boundary between my mind and your mind."
That is easy to say, but not so easy to support with reasons, and saying that it is necessarily true is not a reason.
Phenomenology is the fulfillment of philosophy
Sounds continental, no thank you
@@EmersonGreen genetic fallacy & strawman but okay.
:)
Mental events are events happening in the world or in reality, so in that sense they are as public as any other event. In principle, they are equally accessible.
Our epistemic limitations or our current epistemic access mean nothing beyond that.
There is an unjustified leap from they are contingently private to they are necessarily private.
Otherwise, the argument just presupposes they are necessarily private, i.e., it goes in circles.
What would it even mean for mental events to be necessarily private? Like aren't those events happening out there in public objective reality?
It seems to me you are confusing the ways in which "subjective/objective" are used in on one hand epistemology, and the other hand philosophy of mind. In the sense of the former, of course it is a objectively true that the quality of red looks to you as it does, whereas in the sense of the latter, subjective only means that something is within first person experience - like qualities of conscious states, and so on. That does not mean that I can know, from my first person view, how experiencing pain feels like to you. Would you disagree?
@DesertEagel1995 I disagree with the suggestion that it is necessarily the case that mental events are private. They are happening in reality just like other events. If other events like physical events are not necessarily private, what makes mental events so? Are they magically disconnected from the rest of reality or what? It makes no sense whatsoever to me.
After all the mental events are accesible to its owner. There is nothing about the mind itself that logically precludes access to it. If so, what obstacle is there to another subject having access?
All this video appeals to are some contingent truths.
You're just stating that you disagree with me.
@@EmersonGreen In addition, I pointed that this video doesn't really offer any defense for the proposition that mental events are necessarily private, and I also employed a reductio ad absurdum.
We certainly have introspective faculties regarding our own states that are inaccessible to others (at least without future technology), which creates a kind of asymmetry. But why would this ability be best explained by the supposed infallibility of that faculty? If there are sensors in my body and my introspective faculties use them, it's no surprise others cannot use them, since these sensors are not connected to their bodies. And even if such an infallible faculty were to exist, why would this prevent science from studying these states as usual? Let's imagine God picks a person and grants them unmediated access to the spin of subatomic particles with absolute certainty. Would it prevent us from continuing to do science about spin? No. Spin would remain just as accessible to scientific inquiry as before. So if such an almost magical faculty is a good (even best) explanation of the assymetry, there is no need to equip the state with the kind of science defying privacy qualia supposed to have on the top of that in order to explain the asymmetry.
I don't understand what swinburne means when he says that a brain event isn't an event that anyone has the unique access to of the kind they have to their sensation
If a brain event is happening to you then you would have unique access to it in that it is happening to you. On physicalism we would have unique access to our own brain events since our perspective is of them happening to us and everyone else gets the external perspective.
You and I can have experiences of the same physical event and gain different knowledge due to the event because we have different perspectives of the event. Happening to me vs not happening to me seems like just a special case of observing from different locations. Watching from here isn't going to tell you everything about what its like to watch from somewhere else.
Anyone with the right training could observe your brain activity, including you. It is not the case that anyone could observe your feelings, intentions, etc.
but they can't observe my brain activity if they can't occupy a position from which they are capable of observing my brain activity
My not being able to know exactly what it's like for me to see things from one place by being in another place doesn't seem very different from not being able to know what it's like to be you by not being you, I'm not standing in the right place to experience events the same way.
If we could occupy the exact same space we could get the exact same view of a physical event and in the same way if we could occupy the same state we would both experience what it's like to be in the same state. I get the impression that he can only say that views of physical processes aren't exclusive because he's ignoring that each observational perspective isn't an exact match for any another.
I feel like if we took all applicable physical appearance details into account then any instance of observational access is unique compared to other perspectives, we don't all have the same access to the same physical events in the same way. It seems like physical events could be considered private under his criteria if it's only physically possible for one perspective to receive information about what happened for whatever reason. Something like quantum state interactions being private because they're only accessible to a single interaction which then changes the state of the system such that the way it was can't subsequently or simultaneously be observed in any other way
If we were both to eat a scoop of ice-cream from the same bucket. Given that each scoop contained exactly the same quantity and type of molecules, one could still argue that they were different molecules. We also have different brain structures so might interpret the taste differently.
Is this physically private then? Or is it the qualia that is private?
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