The root of the problem is that I don’t have access to any other phenomenological experiences. I have no direct evidence of how a bird or a tree or a rock experiences their corner of spacetime. It can be described as how to map physical/measurable activity to experiences, but that doesn’t actually help if we can’t detect/measure the experiences in order to have any clue whether our mapping is correct.
If it’s just what someone claims, we have a pretty good mapping—neurons fire, vocal chords vibrate. If it’s what it feels like to be them, we don’t even know what we’re mapping to.
the fact that we have access to our own minds first
I have fairly limited access to my own mind. I give most humans the benefit of the doubt that they do as well, but I can’t really be sure.
I mean, I somewhat agree, but I think this is just a less precise way of saying what I said in the post.
Like, I’m trying to explaining how, even if we assume other peoples account of their own experience are faithful, which give us indirect access to others experience (which is different from no access), and allows us to pin down some of the structure of other people subjective experience, the mapping is still impossible to construct even in principle, because the data of the physical world doesn’t fully determine either mapping.
This is a somewhat stronger claim than the one you’re making.
The root of the problem is that I don’t have access to any other phenomenological experiences. I have no direct evidence of how a bird or a tree or a rock experiences their corner of spacetime. It can be described as how to map physical/measurable activity to experiences, but that doesn’t actually help if we can’t detect/measure the experiences in order to have any clue whether our mapping is correct.
If it’s just what someone claims, we have a pretty good mapping—neurons fire, vocal chords vibrate. If it’s what it feels like to be them, we don’t even know what we’re mapping to.
I have fairly limited access to my own mind. I give most humans the benefit of the doubt that they do as well, but I can’t really be sure.
I mean, I somewhat agree, but I think this is just a less precise way of saying what I said in the post.
Like, I’m trying to explaining how, even if we assume other peoples account of their own experience are faithful, which give us indirect access to others experience (which is different from no access), and allows us to pin down some of the structure of other people subjective experience, the mapping is still impossible to construct even in principle, because the data of the physical world doesn’t fully determine either mapping.
This is a somewhat stronger claim than the one you’re making.