No, because "knowing what it's like" doesn't make any sense. But lets' not open that can of worms again. — Isaac

It makes sense to some of us. Those of us who think there's something to being conscious, and not all conscious experiences are the same across sensations, people and organisms.

To have someone else's feeling in a neurological sense, you'd have to have a sufficiently similar set of neurons firing during the time period of assessment. This would certainly require the same availability of neurotransmitters in the same proportions, but it would also require the same set of axon potentials prior to the assessment period. — Isaac

So the answer is science cannot completely show us the conscious experiences of other people. Or bats for that matter.

An organism only need to respond appropriately to stimuli. It need not group aspects of that response. Fighting for a mate involves pain, but the animal continues nonetheless, standing on a sharp thorn involves pain but the animal desists immediately. 'Pain' doesn't cause some pre-programmed response. The entire set of environmental stimuli at the time does. — Isaac

Yes, but the animal knows what a mate smells like, what food tastes like, and what kind of brightly colored pattern a poisonous animal is likely to have. They don't need language to make these discriminations. Of course it's usually in the form of object recognition like mate or foe, so there is complex cognition going on for many animals that combines sensations into things in an environment.

The point is other animals carve up the world successfully without language.

How so? Our current models would suggest so. I don't think adhering to successful models until they're contradicted by evidence constitutes begging the question. It's a standard scientific approach. — Isaac

So what does it "look like" for neuroscience to someday make all experience public? We can imagine people watching dreams on a tv monitor, assuming anyone's neural activity while dreaming can be 100% mapped for audo-visual outputs. What about the other senses? Do we make use of something like Neuralink and stimulate other people's brain in a way that gives them the same experience?

But what if someone's neurology is atypical? Can I know what it's like to be Hellen Keller? Maybe someone with incredible visualization skills? Or simply the other gender? Can I really know exactly what it's like to give birth as a man?

Will science tell us exactly when someone lies? Maybe a red dot appears in our visual field through our AR glasses. Perhaps we'll get a printout of their inner dialog, or hear them in our earbuds. Or the right chemicals will be released in our brains so we can have their feelings.

None of this is distinguishable from the general milieu of experience by private means. That's what I take to be Wittgenstein's point. That's why he calls it a 'something'. — Isaac

The problem is that human language is relatively recent ability added onto much older nuerological abilities that handle experiencing things like pain so that the organism can respond appropriates. Words are not needed for this. Humans are the exception, not the rule.

Wittgenstein isn't taken into account evolution. Lions don't talk, but they do understand pain. Again, pain wouldn't be of much use if most animals couldn't distinguish it from other sensations and act upon that.

Unless you can propose such a boundary for these private epiphenomena, there's no way of distinguishing the 'slice' of epiphenomena associated with red, form the entire epiphenomena of existence to date. — Isaac

You're talking about carving up our experiences into meaningful categories. That would be true of the world outside the body as well.

With public epiphenomena we have the arbitrary (and loose) linguistic boundaries, with their 'props' of set membership. — Isaac

But animals can perform color and other sensory discriminations without language.

No. Not by any means other than the public language. I have experiences when I injure myself, but which of them are 'pain' I wouldn't know how to distinguish privately. — Isaac

Animals know when they're in pain. Pain would be a useless sensation if an organism couldn't recognize that something was causing potential damage.

Why shouldn't the sharing bring the aspect into being, as it where - the child learns the aspect in the process of learning to talk in a certain way. A child does not have a notion of "four" in its mind that it learns to match up with the word "four"; it learns what four is by moving beads, colouring squares and using the word. — Banno

But how would this behavior be possible unless human brains were capable of forming concepts? The problem with behaviorism is that it treated the brain as a black box, where the only relevant thing was matching behaviors to stimuli. But we know from computational models that the black box matters for producing the behavior. You don't get an output without some sort of mapping function. That's analogous to whatever roles the brain plays processing sensations internally, and producing whatever behavior makes sense for the individual organism.

Roles like perception, cognition, memory, imagination, motor control, speech production and what have you. Without that, you don't get the behavior.

How can subjectivity be shared? — Banno

Language and non-verbal communication in shared environments. As humans we have very similar biology. That helps. But subjectivity only partially ever shared. I can't fully know what it's like to be anyone else or what they're thinking. Consider how much more difficult it is for us to understand non-human animals.

The scientific method doesn't include subjectivity in its theories, even though that's how we all experience the world. Whatever consciousness is and however it fits in with the world science describes, that fact can't be wished away by blaming Descartes.

Philosophy and subjectivity didn't begin with Descartes. The ancient Greeks, Chinese and Indians recognized that subjectivity or the mental was something substantial that needed to be dealt with. Seems like modern critics of the hard problem think that Descartes put philosophy on the wrong path and all it takes is to point that out and the problems go away or something. They don't.

Relying on sense perceptions for a theory of knowledge, the realist has to argue, “apples are red if I perceive them to be red, and I perceive the apple to be red; therefore, apples are red”. This is circular reasoning, as it appeals to sense perception to verify something found in sense perception. — WHAT IS THE MÜNCHHAUSEN TRILEMMA?

Ah, the direct realist specialty. Things are as we perceive them because we say they are.

There is no value, purpose or morality to the universe itself. It just is because it could be for whatever physical reasons. Same with life where the chemical conditions were right for it to come about. But some living things can assign and argue over values because valuing things is useful for survival, and social organisms need to cooperate.

and that anyone who judges any of these things to be acceptable is wrong, because the objective fact of the matter is that these things are unacceptable. — Michael

What makes moral claims objective? While I agree that genocide is bad, I don't see what sort of fact about the world justifies that being an objectively real judgement. The universe doesn't seem to care, and human societies have had different moral codes with philosophers defending competing ethical systems. What makes any of our moral judgements objective?

Is there a kind of internal moral realism? Is it real in the way money and economics are real? We have some means of agreeing on what values to assign to things or actions?

No, reason didn't tell us that. David Hume did. — Wayfarer

Is there a difference? /s

That's not right. For someone inside the block universe, time does flow. — Banno

It appears to flow, but it does not actually flow. This is not because of the physics of the block universe, since time does not flow. Rather, it's an illusion created by our nervous system.

The context of this is that the world is different from how it appears to us. Time does not flow, despite appearances, if the block universe is true.

I open my browser console and type Math period and get a list of mathematical functions and constants in that Math class. So at least for the Javascript predefined universe, this is the case. However, programmers add their own mathematical values and functions outside of Math all the time. Which could be analogous to how we invent new branches of math.

But maybe those maths already exist in the possible space of all Math defined by inherent logic. We could say all possible games of chess or life worlds similarly exist. That requires a realist commitment to possible worlds or at least possibility space. But what happens when one modifies the logic? Does that cause a new possibility space to come into existence? You can always create derivatives of chess, or your own cellular automata.

Or the case of math, add new concepts like infinity or imaginary numbers with their own derivation of the rules.

What’s the big issue with dualism? Why’s it such a boo word? — Wayfarer

Apparently, Descartes ruined it for everybody else. Also, there seems to be this fear that any non-material conclusion leads to woo. Which is bad, because we should have a nice, tidy empirical explanation for everything. Or something.

Thermodynamics teach that information can be lost, is in practice lost all the time, and thus that some events are irreversible. When you burn a book and spread the ashes, it becomes hard to read. When somebody dies, she becomes hard to resuscitate. When a species becomes instinct, it’s hard to recreate it... If tomorrow our planet was swallowed by a black hole, I imagine the planet would melt into some particle soup, and us too. I seriously doubt that we would be able to keep talking about Schopenhauer and Descartes on the forum, unaffected. — Olivier5

In principle, burning a book is reversible, as is a corpse. It's just not feasible for us to do it. But according to the physics, everything you mentioned could be reversed. The information for doing so is conserved in the fire, ashes, decaying body and so on. The environment conserves the information.

Hawking demonstrated that black holes seem to be different. When they evaporate, the information to recover what fell into the black hole is lost. However, progress has been made on how that might not actually be the case. The radiation left over after the evaporation might contain the information, provided one has the right sort of theory for that to be the case.

What other terms could they be explicable in? How else could you explain mind other than as a function of the brain? — Janus

Assuming the mind is explained as a function of the brain. There's quite a few people who think this has not been the case, at least for consciousness, intentionality and intelligence in general.

If the mind could be fully explained, then we'd have a neural account for propositions, as Banno has pointed out. But we don't have anything like that.

Direct realism is not the view that we perceive the world as it really is, but the view that true statements set out how the world is. — Banno

Direct realism is about perception being direct. Metaphysical realism is what we both agree on in principle as realists, but we don't tend to agree on how we get there.

Which is precisely what you would expect for a temporal being. — Janus

If that's what we would expect, then why has there been a philosophical debate between A and B-theory of time, where the second maintains that the flow of time is an illusion?

Well, no it doesn't mean the flow of time is an illusion. — Banno

According to theoretical physicist Carlo Rovelli, time is an illusion: our naive perception of its flow doesn’t correspond to physical reality. Indeed, as Rovelli argues in The Order of Time, much more is illusory, including Isaac Newton’s picture of a universally ticking clock. Even Albert Einstein’s relativistic space-time — an elastic manifold that contorts so that local times differ depending on one’s relative speed or proximity to a mass — is just an effective simplification.

So what does Rovelli think is really going on? He posits that reality is just a complex network of events onto which we project sequences of past, present and future. The whole Universe obeys the laws of quantum mechanics and thermodynamics, out of which time emerges.

https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-018-04558-7#:~:text=According%20to%20theoretical%20physicist%20Carlo,t%20correspond%20to%20physical%20reality.&text=He%20posits%20that%20reality%20is,of%20past%2C%20present%20and%20future. — The Illusion of Time

I can find other physicists stating similar things.

Further, the way the universe appears to us is exactly how it would appear to a being inside a block universe. That's rather the point of the description. — Banno

No, the point is it makes sense Einstein's theories, which rather overturned our notions of space, time and gravity. The reason for the illusion is probably because our nervous system creates the illusion for adaptive reasons.

Why bother trying to support a naive realist view of the world when even the ancients could tell things were not as they appeared? Modern science makes a mockery of the naive realist position.

ou're saying that if the world is such that all moments exist eternally, then we cannot see it as it is because we see only the present moment, or the moments which are serially present to us over our lives. But all that shows is that we only see a part of the world, not that the part we see is not seen as it is. — Janus

The flow of time is that we experience the present always turning into the past (in memory), such that the only moment which exists for us is the present. That's why the eternalism view of time is one that had a lot of support prior to Relativity, because it was consistent with how we experience time. We can't visit the future or the past, so it's like they don't exist. But the block universe says otherwise.

The flow of time and the present moment being special (what exists) are what is the illusion if the block theory is true.

That so many caveats have to be made for "the world being as it appears" is evidence the world is decidedly not as it appears. Three wouldn't even be such a distinction if that were not the case.

Not really; just that the world is not always as it appears to us at the moment. — Janus

Is that a difference that makes a difference?

Ah. You think "change is successions in time" is an example of a true statements having nothing whatsoever to do with the world!

But the floor changes between here, where it is wood board, and the bathroom, where it is tile. There was all this stuff, post Kant, about time being one of several dimensions. — Banno

However, if that means the flow of time is an illusion because the future and past all exist as part of the block universe, then that is yet another example of how the world is not as it appears to us.

it reinforced my prejudice that Kantian metaphysical notions didn't survive 19th century developments in maths and physics. — Banno

Don't be so hasty. This video suggests otherwise, at least form some physicists:



This is a form of the Copenhagen interpretation of QM in which the wave function is just quantifying our knowledge of the system, not the underlying physical reality. The idea is that we set up experiments that have a certain relationship with what's being measured, and we make observations of the experimental results. This is a correlation between the world and our observations. But we can't say what the reality is when we're not performing the experiment. There is one, but it's hidden from us beyond the correlation. Kant is brought up as is anti-realism regarding the math (but not the world as it is).

And thus the suggestion is that theories like MWI and the Pilot-Wave are pointless, because we can't know the state of the world without performing an experiment.

... are easy to test and clearly not metaphysical. Never heard of conservation of information though. — Olivier5

The Black Hole Information Paradox is a big issue in physics because information loss would mean processes cannot in principle be time reversible, which is not the case with most of physics. Thus there is ongoing theoretical work to resolve the paradox. There is some deep relationship between information, energy and thermodynamics, I believe.



The question I have with this sort of thing is where is the empirical basis? It's not like we can observe a black hole evaporate and then measure the state of the Hawking Radiation to see whether any info was lost.

A state of affairs is, at least, like a proposition. But perhaps different in the sense that no-one needs to have stated or believed it. Presumably mice ran behind trees before humans emerged to notice that kind of thing. — Andrew M

Sure, but for whom was the mouse behind the tree? A predator? The mouse? Certainly not the world. States of affairs are a bit tricky. They can contain hidden perspectives like "behind X".

-as if snow could be another color. — Harry Hindu

Never heard of yellow snow? You can certainly have polluted snow which is brown or black. You could also pour food coloring on it. Snow cones are a thing.

It's like saying, "Water is H2O", which is only true in the pure sense. Water often has other things mixed in. It's something to keep in mind in these philosophical discussions. The real world is messy.

Not perceiving the world as it is is different from it being impossible to know the world as it is, which seems to be the charge leveled. First, the way we see the world is related in some manner to how the world is, and second, we have different senses and various tools we've made to augment them to investigate. Science investigates the reality behind appearance, and comes up with theories to explain how things appear.

Granted, as Wayfarer would point out, that does mean we have to take into account how our intellect understands the world in theory formation and what not. We investigate the world given the kinds of minds, bodies, tools (and language) we have. The world though is just whatever it is, including how it appears to us. We do our best to make sense of that, which is somewhere between the naive appearance and a deeper understanding.

So, we don't have to be skeptics in the ancient sense, but we should acknowledge the difficulties and how humans often get things wrong.

because experience and behavior are inseparably linked. — Pfhorrest

Do you think this is the case with meditation, inner dialog, imagination, hallucination and dreaming?

I’ve always been under the impression that’s exactly the opposite of what “as it is” implies, which technically expands to “as it is in itself”. — Mww

It is the opposite. That we have to work hard, applying a rigorous methodology of experimentation with a heavy reliance on math, resulting in many counter intuitive or surprising results means the world as it i differs considerably from the world as it is.

The whole realty/appearance distinction, which wouldn't be a thing if the world appeared to us as it is.

Besides, Kant is wrong. I know this, because I’m a naive realist! — Wayfarer

Naive realists tend to be rather dogmatic about their perceptions.

That person must be, it seems to me, seeing the world as it is.....to a degree. Or they could not do that over and over. Sure, it's a perspective. We are time bound, localized creatures with limited senses. Senses that see the world, to some degree. — Coben

To a degree. I'm not espousing skepticism, except to dogmatic claims. I think we know a lot, just not with certainty. But much of that knowledge came with a lot of work, and the invention of various tools to get beyond our senses.

Janus and Marchesk are playing at philosophy. It's a word game that they drop as soon a they stand up from their armchair and start doing the things. — Banno

Uh-huh. We made this shit up. Not like Hume, Kant, Locke, Pyrro, Schopenhauer, Rorty, Meillassoux or a hundred other philosophers haven't made or discussed similar argument in the entire history of philosophical inquiry.

Jeez, you didn't even quote the end of the sentence. I cannot imagine a more openly evasive response. — Coben

Maybe I was waiting at a bank teller on my phone and couldn't finish responding to the post.

I am going to ignore you from here on out. — Coben

If you can't stand the heat, get out of he damn kitchen.

As it is means exactly that, not a world filtered, incomplete and filled in with sensations.

Yes, we do perceive something about the world as we're running through the field. That which we evolved to see to avoid those sort of obstacles. No, it's not as it is.

Maybe a clarification is in order. We do not perceive the world exactly as it is. We perceive it as hominids. But that's so far from the complete picture that there's no need to explicitly state "exactly".

There is no, non-relational, context free "as it is" to be seen. — Janus

Agreed. Perceiving is relational. It’s also conscious.

— Marchesk
Sure, it is also a perspective, based on observations. So, it can't be binary. Whatever evidence there is that my seeing is limited, filtered, interpreted, — Coben

Then we cannot be perceiving it as it is! I echo Wayfarer in that this pretty standard philosophical
fare, and not new at all.

So, can we make statement about the world that are true, and know that they are true? — Banno

Empirically speaking? Not really. We have less than certain facts and theories explaining those facts, subject to further revision and new facts.

There’s a SEP entry on the problem of perception. It’s as old as philosophy. The short of it is people noticed that we’re subject to illusions, hallucinations and perceptual relativity. Add to that the science of how perception works, and how often science has overturned our intuitions about the world, and it’s clear that the world appears different than it is.