Another Subjective Experience thread (for PTB)

[PairTheBoard]

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Lol, don't bother replying to this. I wrote it in an extraordinarily perverse mood, and don't intend to read it again myself.


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Oh great. Now you tell me. Worm had it wrong. It's not women. SMP is the Rake. [img]/images/graemlins/ooo.gif[/img]

PairTheBoard

[Subfallen]

Lol, now that you've graced my ramblings with a response, I will, dog-like, return to my vomit and perhaps regurgitate it more presentably.

Tomorrow though...tomorrow....

[Subfallen]

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Just because I can refer to experience doesn't mean that I am describing it.

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Well ultimately everything is just "reference" until you've described the state of every quantum particle involved in an experience. We have to abstract away from that granularity, and as long as language can point an accusatory finger---no matter how bony!---singling out the experience in question, the reality of that experience was a linguistically comprehensible one.

[vhawk01]

Can I just say that I am enjoying the quality of threads since NR's retirement? This, the other subjective experience thread, and a few others, have been really interesting.

[Taraz]

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Just because I can refer to experience doesn't mean that I am describing it.

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Well ultimately everything is just "reference" until you've described the state of every quantum particle involved in an experience. We have to abstract away from that granularity, and as long as language can point an accusatory finger---no matter how bony!---singling out the experience in question, the reality of that experience was a linguistically comprehensible one.

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Agreed, but some words are more descriptive than others. The term "television" gives you more information than the term "love". Ideas and feelings are, by their nature, more difficult to describe because they aren't observable objects.

[Subfallen]

PTB -

I will attempt to clarify the ambiguities you exposed in my OP. (Of course, I only wrote to crystallize an idea clouding my own thoughts; now that it's corporeal, perhaps any ghost of meaning has slipped away. But what's the harm in trying?)

Anyways, first we will need to define what it is for a human to have a true model of reality. I suggest we do this by considering one John Doe's model of reality. Over a barbecue on his back porch, John spills the beans to us: a few fuzzy statements about the physics of matter and the metaphysical implications of consciousness. Despite his cuisine being quite satisfactory, Mr. D's philosophy leaves us unsated. I whine, "How can such vague ideas be said absolutely true or false? Why, this is hopeless, HOPELESS!"

Luckily, Ms. Maitreya Smith overhears our plight from her jacuzzi across the picket fence. Ms. M just now received full enlightenment of the Buddha while contemplating her navel (a difficult target, being so distractingly framed by the contents of her bikini!) She offers assistance: "Having both Human intuition and Divine omniscience, I know whether John's model is true in its Constituent Principles." Ms. M confirms that John's notions of gravity, time, and souls are agreeably true human impressions of reality. But when he gets to, "I am appointed once to die and then the Judgment," her chest heaves pleasantly at the shocking denial of what she can only describe as the rebirth of consciousness.

I suggest we use an idealized version of Ms. M as our metric deciding whether a model is true or false. Of course this will not help us find a true model! But it will allow us to separate the truth value of a model from the language and precision used to define the model.

What say you?

[Philo]

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Many seem to think that science is limited to what can be empirically verified...Rather, it entertains ANY model of reality that makes testable predictions.


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Having observational implications, or 'making testable predictions', is exactly how a philosopher of science would characterize theories that are empirically verifiable.

So what does 'making testable predictions' mean if it doesn't mean empirically verifiable?

[Philo]

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Moving to experience, it is important to note that science does not rely on a different "kind" of experience than any other endeavor. Every hypothesis ever made has been sparked by experiences felt by human senses, filtered through human biases, and, reacted to by human emotions. That is, experienced subjectively.

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You seem to be using the term 'subjective experience' in something like the sense of "affected by emotion, personal bias, etc." This is different from what philosophers usually mean by 'subjective experience'.

What philosophers mean by "subjective experience" are experiences that are not objectively accessible to others, i.e., the kind of 'private' or 'first-person' experiences of consciousness (like sensations) and self-conscious thought (like my awareness that I'm thinking about what the weather will be like for tomorrow). Pain is also a kind of subjective experience, since only I can feel my own pain. (there is a necessary objective aspect even to subjective experience but that is usually the domain of philosophy to deal with, not science)

[PairTheBoard]

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Many seem to think that science is limited to what can be empirically verified...Rather, it entertains ANY model of reality that makes testable predictions.


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Having observational implications, or 'making testable predictions', is exactly how a philosopher of science would characterize theories that are empirically verifiable.

So what does 'making testable predictions' mean if it doesn't mean empirically verifiable?

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hellbender brought up the point on another thread that science does not "verify" its models. Evidently there was once a big debate on the issue of "verification". The idea being that to "verify" a model you would have to make every possible test to see if it holds up in every possible circumstance. For example, the model which says that any two objects fall at the same rate in a vacuum. One prediction that model makes is that a feather and a marble fall at the same rate and you can test this. But to "verify" the model you would have to test every pair of objects in the universe against each other because the model says "any" two objects.

Gotta be careful with the word "verify" these days I guess.



PairTheBoard

[PairTheBoard]

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I suggest we use an idealized version of Ms. M as our metric deciding whether a model is true or false. Of course this will not help us find a true model! But it will allow us to separate the truth value of a model from the language and precision used to define the model.

What say you?


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Good luck.

PairTheBoard