Do you agree with the argument? — Aoife Jones
I can never know what it is like to be a bat. — Aoife Jones
1. There is something it is like to be a bat. — Aoife Jones
could not Aoife Jones be changing continually... — Tom Storm
1. There is something it is like to be a bat.
2. However much I learn about the objective world I can never know what it is like to be a bat.
3. Therefore there is something in reality that is outside of the objective world. — Aoife Jones
Conscious experience is a widespread phenomenon. It occurs at many levels of animal life, though we cannot be sure of its presence in the simpler organisms, and it is very difficult to say in general what provides evidence of it. (Some extremists have been prepared to deny it even of mammals other than man.) No doubt it occurs in countless forms totally unimaginable to us, on other planets in other solar systems throughout the universe. But no matter how the form may vary, the fact that an organism has conscious experience at all means, basically, that there is something it is like to be that organism. There may be further implications about the form of the experience; there may even (though I doubt it) be implications about the behavior of the organism. But fundamentally an organism has conscious mental states if and only if there is something that it is like to be that organismsomething it is like for the organism.
We may call this the subjective character of experience. — Thomas Nagel
Do you agree with the argument? — Aoife Jones
Anyway the point I tried ham-fistedly to make is that what Nagel calls the ‘subjective character of experience’ is simply a roundabout way of referring, I think, to ‘being’. Humans, and other sentient beings, are beings, and the word ‘being’ has a particular meaning which I think it usually overlooked. After all humans are beings - that’s how we’re referred to - and arguably bats and other mammals are also beings, albeit non-rational beings. Whereas, I would think, tables and chairs are not. Beings are different to inanimate things because they are subjects of experience. I take that to be one of the imports of Nagel’s essay. — Wayfarer
"This theory of life is strictly mechanistic in so far as life is assumed to operate solely under the physical laws applying to the motion of particles, which laws are sufficient to determine a complete chain of causation. On the contrary, physicists, confining their observation entirely to inanimate matter, have reached the conclusion that there is a further physical law, the so-called second law of thermodynamics, which is suspended by living phenomena. There is according to our theory, this essential difference between living and non-living phenomena; and this difference would supply the basis for the idea of "vital force." Thus the two theories of life can be reconciled." — William James Sidis
I’m just average, common too
I’m just like him, the same as you
I’m everybody’s brother and son
I ain’t different from anyone
It ain’t no use a-talking to me
It’s just the same as talking to you — Bob Dylan
3. Therefore there is something in reality that is outside of the objective world. — Aoife Jones
Actually, it is controversial.Nagel's point is trivially true: there are other creatures, they have different ways of experiencing the world, and we can't know what that's like just by studying those creatures.
That's totally non-controversial (or should be). — RogueAI
How do you know that??2. However much I learn about the objective world I can never know what it is like to be a bat. — Aoife Jones
How do you know that??2. No matter how much I learn about the subjective world, I will never know what it means to be human. — SimpleUser
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