Re: Subjectivity, intimacy, experience

Posted by Eric Charles-2 on
URL: http://friam.383.s1.nabble.com/Subjectivity-intimacy-experience-tp7587205p7587210.html

That raises the obvious (at least to me) question of what "thing" is associated with hunger, pain, anxiety, etc.

Yes! Yes it does. But that was already a question, right? It is not a question only for this way of thinking.

I am happy to elaborate what I think the form of the answer would be within the system I have been presenting. However, I want to be clear that this is one of the possible answers within the larger system being presented. Caveat accepted? Ok.

My inclination would be to assert that hunger, pain, anxiety, etc. are exactly whatever it is that we are responding to when we experience someone else a hungry, in pain, anxious, etc. I am further inclined to assert that one "knows" when one's self is hungry, in pain, anxious, etc., when you perceive that you are doing those same sorts of things. That is, that self-perception and other-perception are the same type of processes.

That set up has the benefit, among other things, of making the question you raise a clearly scientifically tractable issue. There should be no difference in how we go about trying to answer the question "what is iron" or "what is gorilla" or "what is the rate of sea level rise" and how we go about answering the question "what is hunger." Point to the thing in the real world, and we will do our best to try to figure out what you are pointing at. We answer by observing the labeled phenomenon, and by poking and prodding it in various systematic ways.

The detailed form of the answer to "what is hunger" might be quite complex, and might take quite a while to work out, but that often happens in science, and so should be no deterrence. Working it out might even entail an overt rejection of the folk categories in play (e.g., determining that the label "hunger" is routinely applied to several experimentally separable things, or that "hunger" is experimentally indistinguishable from things our plain-language labeled differently), but that also often happens in science, and so should be no deterrence.

On Tue, Mar 1, 2016 at 6:08 PM, Marcus Daniels <[hidden email]> wrote:

“I think we're been around this curve before with Nick saying that he would grant that a robot feels pain if it acts as if it does convincingly enough.”

 

A cybernetic organism based on a human might feel pain like humans do.  But with different hardware one should expect different sorts of experiences.    Sensors and nerves will have different dynamic ranges, and more or less compute resources could be placed on processing these signals.   A robot could have diagnostics to ignore or forget traumas, while humans or cyborgs might not be able to disentangle wanted memories from unwanted ones, just given the way neurons work.

 

It seems to me subjectivity in humans is a high-order effect where the representation changes with experience.   Experience builds on objective events, and physical laws, and people share those experiences.   So for that reason it is not unreasonable to expect that experiences are in some sense the same – even their physical manifestation stored as proteins.    Cells of the visual cortex work more or less the same way across humans, as do the signal processing mechanisms involved in detecting an audio source.   There may not (or may?) be similar structures in encoded memories and high level skills.  Maybe learning is possible in the Matrix way?   I Know Kung Fu! 

 

Marcus

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