🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <BILL.92Dec18121653@ca3.nsma.arizona.edu> bill@nsma.arizona.edu (Bill Skaggs) writes:
>michael@psych.toronto.edu (Michael Gemar) writes:
>
>   > The point is that there is no *necessity* that our sensations be 
>   > equivalent, and indeed, that there is no way of telling if they
>   > *are*.  There is simply *no* objective, scientific way for you
>   > to address my claim that what you see as a sensation of red I
>   > see as a sensation of blue.  This is the problem... 
>
>Well, there is *one* way: we look at what's going on in the brain in
>the two cases.  If you're a materialist, you must believe that the
>answer is in there, somehow.  The only problem is that we can't quite
>*do* it yet, but it's a problem of technology, not principle.

"Somehow" leaves an awful lot of slack, and does *not* rule out principled
problems. In fact, the most popular analysis of the mind-brain relation
poses just such a principled problem. If you're a token identity materialist
(as all functionalists are) then although mind stuff supervenes on brain
stuff, brain stuff will never tell you about brain stuff. There's another
big problem as well, and I suspect that this is waht Michael means: qualia
are inherently subjective, the brain is not. Therefore, by Leibniz's nasty
old law, they cannot be identical, and therefore you're just wrong.

>
>	-- Bill


-- 
Christopher D. Green                christo@psych.toronto.edu
Psychology Department               cgreen@lake.scar.utoronto.ca
University of Toronto
Toronto, Ontario M5S 1A1