Submitted by Gmroo t3_zdfsu4 in philosophy
Reply to comment by Beiquain4yah6oo8ziza in The hard problem of metaphysics: figuring out if other phenomena exist in our universe that like consciousness require we bear a specific metaphysical relation to them - i.e. you can't know of consciousness without being conscious. by Gmroo
Yes, it wouldn't. There's the rub and the basis for my post and issue in our universe. And in your reply "conveying what they are like" is doing a lot of heavy lifting. If someone never had the sense of taste, you can ralk to them till your blue in the face, but they wouldn't know what it's like. And that's the way you know what it even is. To experience it.
So in total what-its-likeness cannot be inferred in principle from any description from the universe. If it can, I'd love to hear how.
>And that's the way you know what it even is. To experience it.
No, perception is one way you can know things, but it is prone to biases, faulty information, illusion, hallucination, etc.. That's why having objective means of measurement or studying things generally is necessary in science, and how e.g. neurology can describe how vision works. Just having vision might lead to false explanations of how vision works. Obviously before microscopes, X-ray imaging, etc., much less was known in biology. [Actually in this instance you probably mean "know what an experience is like", but my point is any knowledge based on that wouldn't be something you could learn verbally, so it's just an aspect of communication. It wouldn't mean someone couldn't know "coffee tastes chocolatey" if they don't know what chocolate tastes like. Facts like that could be known without first person apprehension just based on how the sense work, etc.. ]
Experience gives first person apprehension of some sensory system, but my point was that the inability to convey in language what some experiences are like to speakers who can't have the experience is not a problem of knowledge, at least not something solvable by philosophers like how certain problems are solved in physics to determine experimental results. It's just a brute fact that certain organisms like humans are limited in their senses, and can't perceive beyond them, at least not without some future biotechnology, like to allow humans to sense infrared like snakes or hear higher frequencies like dogs or so on.
No, I meant what isubjective experience even is. If you have zero first person access to any experience, then it's impossible to comprehend what it even is based on any description thereof. This is not a linguistic issue.
The whole conundrum is that concluding processing goes on doesn't give you an inkling of an idea subjective experience even exists or understand anything even if one were to tell you.
Without access to subjective experience all you have left is dry processes you can have a fully exhaustive account of without ever knowing what subjective experience even is.
Well, I would think one should conclude that the inability of human language to directly evoke some previously never sensed sensory experience is a linguistic issue, and isn't a problem to be solved with language, it's just a fact about how human language works.
Getting back to the blog post this was about, it says,
>I argue that if consciousness is only knowable through the unique metaphysical relation we bear to it, then it necessarily follows that other significant phenomena may exist in our universe we don’t know about without the necessary metaphysical relation(s).
Having consciousness is a necessary condition for all knowledge, but it is not a sufficient condition for knowing about a particular thing, even for knowing about consciousness. Before any understanding of how brains work people had consciousness but didn't know what it actually was, that the experience of tasting pistachios was the brain activity resulting from eating pistachios. Having an experience is not the same as knowing what it is. People experience plenty of things without knowing what the experience is.
With language, we can describe what some experiences are like in terms of experiences that a speaker would understand, like people describe various tastes as nutty, or chocolatey, and so on. That way people can sometimes imagine what experiences are like without ever having had them, by their similarity to whatever they have experienced. Hence having had some experience of X isn't always a necessary condition for knowing what X is like, because it could be understood by relation to Y or Z. Or it could be imagined in relation to objective facts. Some things could not be conveyed like that, like the experience of a bat at least largely could not without some kind of mutation scenario or highly advanced implantation or surgical goings on.
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