This seems like sensible ‘meta advice’; thanks!
I’m not sure that listening-to/watching the hearings themselves, in this or other cases, would be of sufficient ‘info profit’ to me to justify not just ‘triangulating’ on the info/evidence I pickup thru my ‘secondary sources’.
I would have been surprised had the ‘primary sources’ NOT seemed meaningful! I think they’re optimizing for meaningfulness! But I think the means by which they’re doing that is crafting a Narrative, which I do distrust. (I expect reality to be generally much messier than a relatively simple story, especially any Morality Play.)
I think a big part of my judging the ‘primary source material’ not being of sufficient ‘info profit’ (for me) is that there’s so much of it. It also doesn’t seem like the kind of info that can be easily, and ‘representatively’, ‘sampled’. I’m sure I’d learn of lots of (supposed) details were I to listen to “a random sample of about 45 minutes” of something like this. But I wouldn’t expect to be able update my beliefs in the right (true) direction. But maybe that wouldn’t matter if I was also still ‘triangulating’ overall.
I’m definitely open to some info from ‘secondary sources’ about this kind of thing. I’ve already revised my beliefs a good bit from that kind of thing.
That’s a perfect example of why it seems sensible to “reject the whole topic”. That’s just picking ‘worship’ instead of ‘explain’.
Yes, I defy the assumption that qualia are “supposed to be subjective”. I would expect ’having surgery under anesthesia or not” to not be entirely subjective.
What do you mean by “know”?
I think that what other people mean when they say or write ‘qualia’ is something like ‘subjective experience’.
I think ‘having qualia’ is the same thing as ‘sentience’ and I think ‘sentience’ is (roughly) ‘being a thing about which a story could be told’. The more complex the story that can be told, the more ‘sentience’ a thing has. Photons/rocks/etc. have simple stories and basically no sentience. More complex things with more complex sensation/perception/cognition have more complex stories, up to (at least) us, where our stories can themselves contain stories.
Maybe what’s missing from my loose/casual/extremely-approximate ‘definition’ of ‘sentience’ is ‘perspective’. Maybe what that is that’s missing is something like a being with qualia/sentience being ‘a thing about which a story could be told – from its own perspective’, i.e. a ‘thing with a first-person story’.
‘Subjective experience’ then is just the type of the elements, the ‘raw material’, from which such a story could be constructed.
For a person/animal/thing with qualia/sentience:
Having surgery performed on them with anesthesia would result in a story like “I fell asleep on the operating table. Then I woke up, in pain, in a recovery room.”
Having surgery without anesthesia would (or could) result in a story like “I didn’t fall asleep on the operating table. I was trapped in my body for hours and felt all of the pain of every part of the surgery. …”
I don’t think there’s any good reason to expect that we won’t – at least someday – be able to observe ‘subjective experiences’ (thus ‘sentience’), tho the work of ‘translating’ between the experiences of ‘aliens’ and the experiences of people (humans) can be arbitrarily difficult. (Even translating between or among humans is often extremely difficult!)
In this extremely-rough model then, ‘consciousness’ is the additional property of ‘being able to tell a story oneself’.