I'm completely in agreement with you. There are very real experiences that people go through, that have similar outcomes including permanent changes in perception but we lack the common scientific concepts and language to discuss them seriously within that particular domain of knowledge.
Isn't it the other way around? You are assuming that we can't observe nor measure an experience while noselasd is leaving the question open (we don't have any proof in favor or against it). The burden of proof is not his/hers.
We may one day be able to measure experience, but we don't know yet. Until then science is the best tool we have.
I do not see any reason to suppose this is true. I grant that this is question that is not being tackled by current research (as far as I know, as neuroscience and theoretical neuroscience are in a period of boom right now), but that does not make it scientifically intractable. There is little I can say about this as I do not know what you mean by "the actual experience".
Please elaborate on how you define what “actually matters.” It seems to me that subjective experience is one of those things, if you value experience at all. If you don’t, I’m not sure anything matters.
And there’s plenty both within and without science that can’t (currently, at least) be defined. But it doesn’t mean they aren’t worth probing.
exactly ^. The first central question is "how is it possible that we have any experience at all?"
That leads naturally to the other important question "who is the observer that's aware" i.e. who is the "we"/I that is aware.
It's telling that science has made incredible progress (e.g. in the last 100 years) but on questions such as these above, we know little more than people knew then. Although we do know a lot more about the mechanics of what and how we experiences things.
I think you're focused on the wrong half of it. The point is not to question if we know we experience a sensation we've labeled subjective experience. But rather, how do we know other things don't have it?
We have no mean to know. Maybe the subjective experience is an inherent part of our intelligence, and not just a side effect. And I do not see any way of applying the scientific method to the subjective experience.
Nethertheless, I really hope that the future will prove me wrong.
Science is unlikely to fill in gaps of subjective experience and values, because it explicitly rules out subjective experience as part of its method. Which it should do. But then it can't very well claim that subjective experience has no value simply because it has no scientific value.
We can't even define what that experience means. From all the information we have the experience is most likely just a physical manifestation of what the parent poster describes.
No, we already know our senses aren't sufficient to document and understand our universe. We need instruments to do the things we can't do ourselves. To somehow elevate our limited experience gathering capabilities because they don't give the same answers as the scientific method is a flawed dead end.
> You're free to define experience differently but usually it devolves into defining unknown by unknown.
Many philosophers would suggest that we don't bother "defining" anything at all, strictly because of the tendency for things to devolve into a semantic death-trap. So instead, we just kind of take it for granted that everyone knows what an experience is, at a base level. For instance, it was an Experience to see Jimi Hendrix. However, I definitely have not had that particular experience. There are experiences I could have, such as the experience of going on a roller coaster, or going into space, and ones that I could not have, such as the experience that an anglerfish has when it eats. The question at hand is whether or not these experiences have anything to do with each other, whether there's a "Grand Unified Theory" of experience and consciousness that allows us to make mutual sense of these disparate experiences, or whether there's some limit to what things might constitute an experiment - e.g. the experience of being a rock thrown through a window.
Very few things in science can be directly experienced. I can't see an electron with my eyes, I have to rely on the reports of machines and infer the electron. And even the reports of my eyes aren't, ultimately, direct experience. That our investigation of consciousness has to take place indirectly is in no way novelty for scientific inquiry.
It is a thing. We know how to study correlations between brain activity and conscious experience. The hard problem involves figuring out how brain activity causes conscious experience. Once we explain it (or, as in physics, have a convincing theory) it won't be a problem at all anymore. Saying that something that everyone experiences all the time "doesn't exist" is not a convincing theory.
All I'm pointing out is that knowing is the only thing that is there. The experiencing structure is only the knowledge that is there of the experience. Otherwise if knowledge wasn't there you wouldn't know what you are experiencing, or when you're experiencing it.
You’re just using another slippery term when you invoke “experience” in that way though. We know that experience is just chemistry with higher-order structure, even in humans.
I believe the problem is not that we can't define the "experience of existence", because this phenomenon could exist entirely independently of our physical (scientific) reality. The problem is that there is an interaction between the experience of "I am aware" and the physical reality, for otherwise, we would not be discussing this topic here!
Total agreement on the fact that we are as clueless as it gets to explain emergence of experience. That's why I think that the only reasonable avenue forward is to try and take experience as a fundamental building block. We are going through our age's copernican revolution.
The illusionism argument is ridiculous because an illusion is still experienced (the very fact we are talking about it is proof), so at best it is circular reasoning. Probably it's woo-enough to be taken seriously by some :)
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