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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.
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