If something is conscious, it seems like there should be a fact of the matter as to what it is experiencing.
Well, going back to humans for a moment, there are two kinds of fact we can ascertain:
how people behave under various experimental conditions, which include asking them what they are experiencing;
how (what we very strongly suspect is) the material substrate of their conscious experience behaves under various experimental conditions, such as MRI, etc.
For anything else of which we have provisionally reached the conclusion that it is conscious, we can broadly make the same two categories of observation. (Sometimes these two categories of observation yield result that appear paradoxical when we compare them, for instance Libet’s experiments. These paradoxes may lead us to revise and refine our concept of consciousness.)
In fact the first kind is only a particular instance of the second; all our observations about conscious beings are mediated through experimental setups of some kind, formal or informal.
I’d go further and claim (based on cumulative refinements and revisions to the notion of consciousness as I understand it) that our observations about ourselves are mediated through the same kind of (decidedly informal) experimental setup. As the Luminosity sequence suggests, the way I know how I think is the same way I know how anybody else thinks: by jotting notes to an experimenter which happens to be myself.
The “multiplicity of possible conscious experiences” isn’t a question we could ask only about GBertha, but about anything that appears conscious, including ourselves.
So, what difference does it make to my objections to a GLUT scenario?
Well, going back to humans for a moment, there are two kinds of fact we can ascertain:
how people behave under various experimental conditions, which include asking them what they are experiencing;
how (what we very strongly suspect is) the material substrate of their conscious experience behaves under various experimental conditions, such as MRI, etc.
For anything else of which we have provisionally reached the conclusion that it is conscious, we can broadly make the same two categories of observation. (Sometimes these two categories of observation yield result that appear paradoxical when we compare them, for instance Libet’s experiments. These paradoxes may lead us to revise and refine our concept of consciousness.)
In fact the first kind is only a particular instance of the second; all our observations about conscious beings are mediated through experimental setups of some kind, formal or informal.
I’d go further and claim (based on cumulative refinements and revisions to the notion of consciousness as I understand it) that our observations about ourselves are mediated through the same kind of (decidedly informal) experimental setup. As the Luminosity sequence suggests, the way I know how I think is the same way I know how anybody else thinks: by jotting notes to an experimenter which happens to be myself.
The “multiplicity of possible conscious experiences” isn’t a question we could ask only about GBertha, but about anything that appears conscious, including ourselves.
So, what difference does it make to my objections to a GLUT scenario?