Consciousness is a self-referential physical process whose special character comes from recursion
The point of the conjecture of strong subjectivity is precisely that consciousness is probably not something like that. For if the conjecture is true then consciousness would be fundamentally subjective and therefore have no other knowable properties. Not because they are hidden, but because it just doesn’t have them.
You seem to say. 1) One can obtain information about an experience, 2) construct an arbitrarily accurate model of it, 3) reproduce a structurally equivalent experience, but you will still fail to undergo the same experiential event. Of course I agree with that. You can experience the same experience by construction only from the same structure. It is private in that sense.
Indeed, we can not experience someone else’s experience because we would have to be them to do that. But my point is that, since that seems the only way to have access to consciousness, there appears to be no way to objectively know anything about it. One could argue that there may be other ways to know about consciousness besides directly experiencing it. But then the only thing we might go by are descriptions (or at least behavioral responses). Even from the most eloquent descriptions, as far as I know, nobody has ever been able to really learn anything about what it is to have a conscious experience. Hence the conjecture, that suggests: if this has not been possible despite all of our efforts, we should assume that consciousness is indeed fundamentally subjective and accept its implications. Not to stifle the debate of course, but to see where we can get from there.
In Thou art rainbow: Consciousness as a Self-Referential Physical Process, I argue that the experience is special but mostly because such phenomena are actually rare. I’d also argue—along the lines of Parameters of Metacognition—The Anesthesia Patient—that it is not as clearcut an unobservable as it often seems.
The point of the conjecture of strong subjectivity is precisely that consciousness is probably not something like that. For if the conjecture is true then consciousness would be fundamentally subjective and therefore have no other knowable properties. Not because they are hidden, but because it just doesn’t have them.
You seem to say. 1) One can obtain information about an experience, 2) construct an arbitrarily accurate model of it, 3) reproduce a structurally equivalent experience, but you will still fail to undergo the same experiential event. Of course I agree with that. You can experience the same experience by construction only from the same structure. It is private in that sense.
Indeed, we can not experience someone else’s experience because we would have to be them to do that. But my point is that, since that seems the only way to have access to consciousness, there appears to be no way to objectively know anything about it. One could argue that there may be other ways to know about consciousness besides directly experiencing it. But then the only thing we might go by are descriptions (or at least behavioral responses). Even from the most eloquent descriptions, as far as I know, nobody has ever been able to really learn anything about what it is to have a conscious experience. Hence the conjecture, that suggests: if this has not been possible despite all of our efforts, we should assume that consciousness is indeed fundamentally subjective and accept its implications. Not to stifle the debate of course, but to see where we can get from there.