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hasbroslasher | 6 years ago
This has so much potential to become a semantic death trap - but let me ask if you think even human experience could be experimentally tested? If you put me in a room, what could you do to see whether or not I'm "having an experience"? Would the mere act of placing me there be an "experience" or would it be a false positive? What does "non-experience" even mean? I don't see it as counterintuitive to suggest that normally inanimate things like rocks can have experiences - though their experiences are fundamentally different than ours. For instance, we will never be smelted, turned into concrete, etc. and rocks don't have memory or feeling apparatus like we do.. but they do "experience" reality on a very simple level.
ajuc|6 years ago
Indeed, that's why putting meaningless arbitrarily defined touchy-feely words in physics is a bad idea. But I'll try.
Experience = event that changes the model of the world you have in your brain. We can verify it experimentally by for example:
- testing if you associate a loud buzz with food before the experiment (either by looking at neurons that activate when you think of food or by looking at saliva production)
- repeatedly giving you food after buzzing
- testing again if you associate a loud buzz with food
We can deduce from that change that your internal model of the world changed to associate "buzz" with "food" so you experienced our experiment.
This isn't a definition I will defend because I don't think such definitions are that important in the first place.
Now I don't think a stone has internal model of the world, and even if it does - I don't see how can it change. But I cannot experimentally test it :)
hasbroslasher|6 years ago
So if I don't have a brain, then I can't have experiences? What if we find aliens out there that don't have brains? Or computers? Are they a-experiential by nature of not having brains, or is it something deeper?
> Indeed, that's why putting meaningless arbitrarily defined touchy-feely words in physics is a bad idea
We're not talking strictly about physics, though. I doubt most physicist professors would not let you bring up questions like these in physics class because they are the subject of an entire field of philosophy. And while there is relevant science to our debate, there's a lot of "soft" arguments outside of the scientific worldview that you should at least read and consider. See Jackson's knowledge argument, Block's Chinese Brain, or Nagel's "what it's like to be a bat" arguments. They "touch" on the uncomfortable ubiquity of things that we "feel" to be outside of a purely scientific view of the world.
> We can deduce from that change that your internal model of the world changed to associate "buzz" with "food" so you experienced our experiment.
This is a bit off kilter. Do people with memory or learning disorders, then, not have "experiences" because they don't learn? What about those who are deaf? You're essentializing consciousness into "ability to learn by hearing and rationally deduction". Computers can take audio input and learn from it with very primitive machine learning models - does that mean that the computer is having experiences akin to our own human experiences?
My advice is to give philosophy its due course! Read up on the touchy-feely stuff because it can be profoundly interesting.
cameronh90|6 years ago
https://www.nationalgeographic.com/science/phenomena/2015/12...
guerrilla|6 years ago
This is a giant leap to claim that they have a model and experience. You demonstrated that what they have is internal state, i.e. memory, which many machines have. That's what you proved, not that they experience anything.