Problems studying the Subjective

Andrew4Handel

If two people have headaches there is no way of comparing whether both of them are having the same type of pain.

This is a basic problem first of even knowing whether similar/the same phenomena are experienced the same way because the experience is private and only accessible first-person.

Following on from this problem, there are many things that people experience first-person where we don't know if they are referring to the same phenomena such as:

Memory. Belief. Desire. Thought. Dreams. Just any experience that is rich and detailed including historical recollections of an event. Values. And so on.

I was surprised when a sighted person told they didn't dream in images because I dream in life like images and sounds.

So is the is this a resolvable problem? Does this mean we are closed off from others in some kind of profound way?
I think it is all a problem form brain correlations because if you can't define something accurately how can you correlate it?

I have never been in a romantic relationship and I feel that if I do I still would not have insight into another person mind however intimate we get because actual subjectivity is solipsistic and impenetrable. When I do feel a connection with someone that is good but somewhat inexplicable but you just feel like the other person understands you better than most people you meet.

T Clark

If two people have headaches there is no way of comparing whether both of them are having the same type of pain.

This is a basic problem first of even knowing whether similar/the same phenomena are experienced the same way because the experience is private and only accessible first-person.

Following on from this problem, there are many things that people experience first-person where we don't know if they are referring to the same phenomena such as:

Memory. Belief. Desire. Thought. Dreams. Just any experience that is rich and detailed including historical recollections of an event. Values. And so on. — Andrew4Handel

I don't see this as a problem. The act of seeing other people as people requires we make a metaphorical connection with them. We intuitively, empathetically recognize they experience the world in ways very similar to the way we do. Without that recognition we could not even communicate. So, is my headache the same as theirs? Are my memories, beliefs, desires, thought, and dreams the same? Maybe. We can ask questions to figure that out.

Does this mean we are closed off from others in some kind of profound way? — Andrew4Handel

Not at all. I like people and wish them well. I like to hang around with them, live with them, and work with them. I try to understand the way they think and how thy feel. I try to treat them with fairness, kindness, and respect. I feel a connection with them.

Tom Storm

I don't see this as a problem. The act of seeing other people as people requires we make a metaphorical connection with them. We intuitively, empathetically recognize they experience the world in ways very similar to the way we do. Without that recognition we could not even communicate. So, is my headache the same as theirs? Are my memories, beliefs, desires, thought, and dreams the same? Maybe. We can ask questions to figure that out. — T Clark

Nice. Totally agree.

Andrew4Handel

I don't see this as a problem. The act of seeing other people as people requires we make a metaphorical connection with them. We intuitively, empathetically recognize they experience the world in ways very similar to the way we do. — T Clark

I had a late diagnosis of autism and that is a condition it seems where people see and experience the world differently to other people.

Initially they claimed it was a deficit of empathy in autistic people but now a better theory is that neurotypical and autistic people are having different experiences and it is a failure of communication.

I don't know if feeling comfortable around other people means you are sharing experiences. I am not convinced it overcomes a barrier in true knowledge of someone else's subjective life.

I also come from a strict religious background. People in this kind of religious situation create an environment that is closed of and only people growing up in it can empathise with the experience. That has probably been a personal problem for me not growing up "normally" so to speak and not sharing common experinces.

I think familiar experiences can be created in this kind of culturally closed of self enforcing way and emotional bonds created.

But my issue is with theoretically explaining psychological states. Because it may well be true we have a certain of understanding people like us in our culture but I wouldn't class it as scientific knowledge.

T Clark

...neurotypical and autistic people are having different experiences and it is a failure of communication.

I don't know if feeling comfortable around other people means you are sharing experiences. I am not convinced it overcomes a barrier in true knowledge of someone else's subjective life. — Andrew4Handel

I don't know to what extent our differences in experience are caused by the fact that I am neurotypical and you are autistic or are just the regular differences that all people have. Many people here on the forum see the world differently than I do. Just before I read your post I was writing another on the "Pop Philosophy and Its Usefulness" thread. In that discussion, @Mikie and I are having a very similar difference in how we experience the world as the one you and I are having. It happens to me pretty often.

Andrew4Handel

One issue that arises in the study of memory os the wide variety of types of memory.

Muscle memory is considered part of playing the piano or riding a bike. Where you remember how to position your body (also including general proprioception) So this may involve the brain's motor cortex.

Episodic memory is something like remembering when you took your driving test.

Flashbulb memory is like a vivid memory such as of 9/11. where you were and so on.

Semantic memory can include memory of general knowledge and the lexicon.

So these things may all involve different parts of the brain. But when you explore your own idea of memories some memories are combinatorial or vague and constructed (like false memories)

This may be where phenomenology (detailed phenomena analysis) may come in.

So take 9/11, I had been to the dentists. I was in the UK. It was in New York. I was asleep. I woke in the evening. It was September. It was a warm day. I was very upset. And so on. This memory has various components.

Is this all just some series of neurons firing in the brain? Is it an accurate memory? Also how am I transmitting all this information by symbols on a screen.

Andrew4Handel

I suppose my hypothesis would be is that "we will never be able to fully define memory or map it onto a single brain region"

Or:

"All mental states have a subjective aspect and Qualia (experiential feel)"

Empathy is a controversial issue because it usually involves the alleged ability to imagine someone else's experiences.
I think this may be possible in a few cases but:

Can you imagine having HIV or Cancer if you don't have them? Can you imagine being a serial killer? Can you imagine being the opposite sex? Being (pregnant/menstruating). Being gay/straight/bi?

There is just a huge range of potential states and situations to empathise with. Are we succeeding to create a decent society based on empathy or are we actually committing serious failings?

Tom Storm

Empathy is a controversial issue because it usually involves the alleged ability to imagine someone else's experiences.
I think this may be possible in a few cases but:

Can you imagine having HIV or Cancer if you don't have them? Can you imagine being a serial killer? Can you imagine being the opposite sex? Being (pregnant/menstruating). Being gay/straight/bi? — Andrew4Handel

I think it is possible to get too concrete with these sorts of matters. To 'imagine' doesn't require 100% match of another's experience. That's why it is called imagination. For instance, I have my own experiences to draw upon that may be used to imagine how others are experiencing things. I have been very sick - I can imagine the debilitations and complexities in having cancer or any illness (not to mention that I have watched many people die).

Serial killer? I can imagine being persecuted by obsessions and having the need to release myself through predatory behaviour.

Being gay? Is it difference to being straight? Love and sex are pretty much interchangeable. The experience of discrimination I can imagine, having experienced discrimination before.

Again, I don't think it is necessary to map onto another's experience 100% in order to imagine another's situation in a useful way to generate empathy. We have access to glimmers of another's experience.

The Roman poet Terence made the point that, 'I consider nothing that is human alien to me.' I think this resonates with many but perhaps not all of us.

Andrew4Handel

To 'imagine' doesn't require 100% match of another's experience. — Tom Storm

Are we really imagining someone else's experience or just remembering our own experience?

When I was involved in the care of my seriously disabled brother with Multiple sclerosis I never knew what his experiences might be like such a creeping paralysis, vision loss, pressure sores and so on.

I just had to ask him what he wanted done to make him comfortable. With caring work they suggest you don't assume you know what the person wants but just listen to their experiences and requests.

I feel that people's imagination can be wrong and they impose a false representation onto someone else. It could be they diminish or exaggerate someone's experiences.

Banno

If two people have headaches there is no way of comparing whether both of them are having the same type of pain. — Andrew4Handel

But that's not right...

Migraine

pounding
pulsating
“sick” headaches (due to associated nausea)
throbbing sensation
Tension headache

squeezing
tightness
vise-like
Cluster headache

horrible
severe
suicide headache
worst pain ever
Indomethacin-sensitive headaches

jabbing
jolts
lightning bolts
shock-like
stabbing — Here's How to Accurately Describe Your Headache to a Doctor

and so on.

So the premise of your argument is misplaced.

This is a basic problem first of even knowing whether similar/the same phenomena are experienced the same way because the experience is private and only accessible first-person. — Andrew4Handel

No, they are not. All such phenomena are public: we can and do talk about them. The Private Language argument applies here.

The notion of "subjective", private stuff is fraught with incoherence, misguiding many a discussion. If it is private, then it lies outside our discussion. If it is part of our discussion, then it is not private.

Andrew4Handel

↪Banno

I don't think that list of symptoms proves a point.

In order to know what a pulsating headache is like you have to have had one. My mum has never had a headache and doesn't know what they are like.

Likewise if I read a list of pregnancy and menstruation symptoms I would still not know what the experience was like because I am male bodied. I can't experience having a uterus.

As I said in my last post I think imagining someone else's experience may just be revisiting your own.

I am not saying there are no accessible aspects to mental states but that we cannot truly compare two peoples. And then defining conceptual, abstract mental states requires some way of knowing what we are actual referring to and if it is even something physical.

Richard B

f two people have headaches there is no way of comparing whether both of them are having the same type of pain. — Andrew4Handel

Some food for thought from Normal Malcolm's "The Privacy of Experience."

"Giving the location of one's sensation is not locating it in the space of physics or astronomy, but in a space of sensations that has one's own body as its frame of reference. If A locates a sensation in his space of sensation (e.g. in his right shoulder), and B locates a sensation in the corresponding place in B's space of sensation (e.g. in his right shoulder), then B's sensation is in the same place as A's sensation. If B located his sensation in a non-corresponding place (e.g. his right foot), then B's sensation would be in a different place from A's. Tis is how we use the expression "same place,"different place", in regard to sensations. Therefore, A and B are not giving different descriptions when each says, "in my shoulder."

One needs to keep in mind how we use "pain" from a first and third person perspective.

Andrew4Handel

What I meant by comparing is placing side by side like to apples or two cars or fish. Not comparing by metaphor and analogy.

Michael

I suppose we can’t know for certain, but we can make reasoned assumptions. We know that the same kind of stimulus causes in ourselves the same kind of experience, e.g. light of a particular wavelength causes us to see a particular colour (the colours you see aren’t random). So we have evidence that the relationship between a stimulus and the subsequent experience is deterministic. It then stands to reason that if your physiology is much like mine then the relationship between that same stimulus and your experience will follow much the same deterministic process, and so that your experience will be much like mine.

Tom Storm

I feel that people's imagination can be wrong and they impose a false representation onto someone else. It could be they diminish or exaggerate someone's experiences. — Andrew4Handel

However (in addition to @Banno's point about private language) as I said, we don't need to be too concrete about this. I am comfortable with notion that my pain/experience is similar enough to other people's pain/experience, sufficient for me to generate empathy. That's the point. I'm not saying it is an exact match or qualitative equivalent. It doesn't need to be.

As I said in my last post I think imagining someone else's experience may just be revisiting your own. — Andrew4Handel

You wrote 'may just' but it may not... the point is our own pain is enough to understand that pain is not good, not fun, not desirable and therefore we 'feel' for the other in their pain through our own experience and humanity. We can still retain the notion that everyone is slightly different in their experience yet hold enough commonality to share the experience of being human.

Banno

In order to know what a pulsating headache is like you have to have had one. — Andrew4Handel

What's a pulsating headache like? Well, it's pulsating...

So you don't have to have had one to know what it is like.

Likewise if I read a list of pregnancy and menstruation symptoms I would still not know what the experience was like because I am male bodied. I can't experience having a uterus. — Andrew4Handel

You won't have experienced it, sure, but it doesn't follow that you know nothing about what it is like.

I am comfortable in the notion that my pain/experience is similar enough to other people's pain/experience — Tom Storm

Also, consider mirror-sensory synaesthesia

Isaac

Before people get too carried away with this "what it's like" nonsense, an admonitory...

https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/philosophy/article/is-there-anything-it-is-like-to-be-a-bat/EC6290746D630C343A661C8C0F4D8B8E

Banno

↪Andrew4Handel

Far and away the biggest problem with "studying the Subjective" is that it is very unclear what "the subjective" is.

Because if something is available only to you, and to no one else, then it cannot be a useful part of our conversation.

You may not be familiar with this:

293. If I say of myself that it is only from my own case that I know what the word “pain” means a must I not say that of other people too? And how can I generalize the one case so irresponsibly?

Well, everyone tells me that he knows what pain is only from his own case! – Suppose that everyone had a box with something in it which we call a “beetle”. No one can ever look into anyone else’s box, and everyone says he knows what a beetle is only by looking at his beetle. a Here it would be quite possible for everyone to have some- thing different in his box. One might even imagine such a thing con- stantly changing. a But what if these people’s word “beetle” had a use nonetheless? a If so, it would not be as the name of a thing. The thing in the box doesn’t belong to the language-game at all; not even as a Something: for the box might even be empty. a No, one can ‘divide through’ by the thing in the box; it cancels out, whatever it is.

That is to say, if we construe the grammar of the expression of sensation on the model of ‘object and name’, the object drops out of consideration as irrelevant. — Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations

Banno

By private phenomena I don’t mean phenomena that can’t be talked about. I mean phenomena that “happens” to one person but not to another. — Michael

This seems to me to be the same as the beetle. The beetle "happens" to one person but no other, and as a result drops out of conversation.

Michael

↪Banno

Now imagine I was shown a copy of what is in your box. Would I recognise it as being a beetle? Only if it looks like what’s in my box. Irrespective of how I use the word, it refers to and means something to me.

Isaac

it refers to and means something to me. — Michael

How can it do either to you? You are you.

You think of an X, then use the word 'x' to privately refer to the X you just thought of? But you're already thinking of it. What is referring doing here?

Michael

↪Isaac

Don’t quite get what you mean. When I talk about the beetle in my box my words are referring to the thing inside my box. The thing inside my box is what I understand a beetle to be. That you can’t see inside my box and I can’t see inside your box is irrelevant.

Banno

I was shown a copy of what is in your box. — Michael

Ex hypothesi, this cannot be done. You can't show me a copy of your pain, or your red qual.

Irrespective of how I use the word, it refers to and means something to me. — Michael

Even if you can refer to it, and that is not clear, it does not refer to anything someone else can refer to, so it drops out of the conversation.

↪Isaac

And how could you tell that what you are referring to, by "x", now, is what you were referring to when you christened it "x"?

Michael

You can't show me a copy of your pain, or your red qual. — Banno

Even if you can refer to it, and that is not clear, it does not refer to anything someone else can refer to, so it drops out of the conversation. — Banno

These seem like inconsistent claims. You start by referring to my pain, seemingly accepting that it’s inaccessible to you, and then say that you can’t refer to my pain.

Jamal

If two people have headaches there is no way of comparing whether both of them are having the same type of pain. — Andrew4Handel

Does this mean we are closed off from others in some kind of profound way? — Andrew4Handel

I think of my subjectivity as my point of view. My point of view is my own--only I can stand right here, right now--and expecting someone else to share it is to expect them to be me, and that doesn't make sense. It's too much to ask. Does this count as being closed off? Maybe it would if we didn't have language to communicate what we perceive and feel (having lived in countries where I don't know the language well, I know the feeling of isolation and powerlessness)--but then if we didn't have language we wouldn't be the kind of creatures who worried about being closed off. Maybe it follows that the conditions that lead us to think we are closed off--a rich inner life that owes its existence to the essentially social fact of language--are precisely those that allow us not to be.

Isaac

When I talk about the beetle in my box my words are referring to the thing inside my box. — Michael

How?

By what mechanism are they 'referring'?

I might say, for example, that when I say "give the hat to John", my use of 'John' refers to John via drawing your attention to the public label for the person called John. I could give an account of your learning John's name by experiment, I could even give an account of the neural processes connecting your auditory perception to that learned label (though I suspect you'd thank me to not).

What I don't seem able to do is give a similar account of what using a word privately to refer to your own private thought might be. It certainly can't be drawing your attention to it (it was already there), it can't be connecting a label (the connection is already made), it can't be learning by experiment (as

↪Banno

says, by what test could you possibly learn)...

So what are you claiming is going on when you privately use a word to refer to a private sensation?

Michael

What I don't seem able to do is give a similar account of what using a word privately to refer to your own private thought might be. — Isaac

You make the same inconsistent argument that Banno made above. Presumably the phrase "your own private thought" refers to my own private thought.

Banno

↪Michael

Oh, Michael. The first is by way of assumption in the reductio of the beetle argument that shows the second to be problematic. If one sets up a private thingie, one becomes unable to talk about it. Hence there can be no private thingies in our little chat.

Michael

If one sets up a private thingie, one become unable to talk about it. — Banno

That's what I reject. Just because it only happens inside my head isn't that I can't talk about it. Just because you can't see the contents of my box isn't that I can't talk about what's inside.

Banno

Just because it only happens inside my head isn't that I can't talk about. — Michael

But if you can talk about it to others, then it is by definition not private.

And so, since we are talking about it, it's not happening only inside your head.

Michael

But if you can talk about it to others, then it is by definition not private.

And so, since we are talking about it, it's not happening only inside your head. — Banno

You're equivocating.

We might use the word "private" to mean "something that can't be talked about" or we might use the word "private" to mean "something that only happens inside my head" but these are two different definitions.

So let's just not use the word "private" and I'll simply say:

I can talk about something that only happens inside my head.

Problems studying the Subjective

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