Story of my Life.

Now even you I did not know was so boring.

i suspect it has more to do with water.

Something about a doctor poking around in a woman’s brain making her laugh on command, creeps me out and arouses me at the same time.

Define “experience” as you mean it?

Could one say that “consciousness” is a noumenon?

No consciousness is a phenomenon.

IT’S BOTH!

Other people’s consciousness is noumenon, with a little bit of phenomenon evidence.

Your own consciousness is phenomenon.

I can at times be quite boring but then again…at times…well you might be surprised. lol

But we all come from different perspectives. Yours may be based in the part of my life which you have not lived.
I for one would like to live within your brain for about 10 minutes - it might help me to understand you better. It might take longer than that though.

A prime example of a language game; you all are talking about consciousness as if it were a thing, and confusion results.

Think of the ways in which you use the word ‘consciousness’ that make it noticably meaningful.

He is conscious, doctor.

He’s lost consciousness.

Be conscious of what you are doing.

In each of these examples you know precisely what is meant with the word. But when you put this otherwise ordinary term into a metaphysical environment, all the ‘signs’, as Wittgenstein put it, are lost.

Now you are all talking about consciousness in a way that doesn’t make it meaningful, and calling it something (noumena) that doesn’t exist.

That’s a double philosophically nonsensical whammy, you know.

If one were to say ‘consciousness is a phenomena’, this would meaningfully translate into ‘the person who is conscious is a phenomena’, because a person can be experienced.

Moreover, the statement ‘I can’t experience your consciousness’ isn’t true or false, because consciousness is not something that can or can’t be experienced.

Hate to cut in but I dissent with the above. consciousness or reversible a Möbius strip kind of lining underplays it, a lot can be inferred, a whole lot can be known from another’s experoence, usually beyond the intended communication of the author.
And that creates a grey area between literal and figurative, fact and fiction, trust and distrust. you simply never know, just have to trust your instincts.
If you do, and have done so, to your benefit then go on. if not be resigned to the futility to ever really trust anyone.

Through an analogy of behavior, yes. He smiles, he must be happy. He bites his nails, he must be nervous. Etc. But there is no communication going on here outside of behavior and language. You cannot make ‘contact’ with another consciousness. I could be a p-zombie and you couldn’t tell the difference.

You’d be irreversibly damaged, I think.

If one bites one nails, one can become nervous. If one rubs ones chin, one can force ones self to think more deeply.

Emotions can be forced by physical actions. It is hard for someone to bite ones nails and not become nervous from the act of doing so.

They could still be a p-zombie though.

But there is little else then behavior and language. if there is, it can only be sensed through other means,
such as?

Extra ordinary means of communication

Extra-ordinary means of. Omani action. But of that later.

Error In the above, pls scratch ‘Omani Action’ It is an uncorrectible typo.

There is an Edit button you know.

You’re basing that on what you know about yourself but you don’t know who I am, what I am capable of or not capable of, where my journey has taken me.
And if you yourself have not been irreversibly damaged, you can’t say the same about me.

Trixie

I don’t go along with that. It’s what people can do when they relate to one another on an intimate non-sexually speaking level.
Are you going to tell me that you can’t know a person, look at a person and see their consciousness, how they think, feel, intuit and experience on some level what it’s like to be them - we do it at times ALSO through empathy and compassion. One doesn’t even have to know a person but observe them for a time.

You also say someone could be a zombie and you wouldn’t know it. You couldn’t see the lack of light in their eyes or their conscious, deliberate acts or movements? You couldn’t tell in the way they spoke to you - probably more vacuus then even a robot might and a robot does have a certain kind of consciousness though it’s not human.

Of course, that’s just my perspective.

There is a long philosophical history which is responsible for the development of the notion of ‘spirit’, which culminated in the rationalism of the seventeenth century. Here’s a short version.

First there was the epistemologically underdeveloped idea of the spirit held by primitive, religious cultures (these being animistic… not yet anthropomorphic). This the result of the evolution of the frontal cortex, an addition that gave man the capacity for self awareness. The strangeness of this new self awarness was responsible for man feeling as if he had freewill; his deliberate acts of volition gave him the impression that he was something other than a mechanical body operated by the laws of nature. Trees blew in the wind, water flowed, rocks rolled down hills, but man could ‘choose’ to do what he did, he could deliberate and plan, foresee and anticipate possible outcomes, and this was something other natural things could not do. Now man unwittingly created a new metaphysical division (which will later be analyzed by epistemologists and rationalists of all colors); man no longer thought of himself as a dumb mechanical force, but rather as a ‘subject’ that does action… the ‘doer’ and the ‘deed’ now being seperate things. Enter the pronoun; ‘I’ raise my arm, ‘I’ eat a doughnut, ect. Formally, before self awareness of this kind, human ancestors just plodded along without language, and therefore without language oriented thinking.

Fastforward thousands of years. More advanced human beings, now called ‘philosophers’, use their now extraordinarily complex language to further define and describe the category of the ‘subject’, the ‘me’. This notion then becomes thought of as a different substance than that which things in the world are composed of. The greeks used an analogy of an instrument to describe how the subject relates to and is connected to the body. Is the spirit the instrument, the tuning of the instrument, the sound of the instrument, what? Does the spirit leave the body in the same way that an instrument becomes silent when it isn’t played. So on and so forth.

Now that the pronoun ‘me’ is a permanent fixture in philosophical language, philosophers from the dark ages forward begin messing around with it epistemologically. The father of a new and thoroughly thought out rationalism appears… Descartes, who’s famous dualistic system asserted that there were two distinct substances… one was material substance, the other spiritual substance, and the two interacted casually (later Spinoza would refute this dualistic theory). Kant comes in and calls this phenomenological ‘self’ a transcendent thing, whatever that means.

Summary: dumb human ancestors walk around unaware. Brain evolves. A neat little glitch in the processing centers creates the illusion of freewill (see ‘five millisecond rule’). Man becomes aware of his being aware and calls himself ‘me’. He says ‘I’ do this. Not only that this is done, but there is also a ‘doer’ who does it, and that is me.

Philosophers incorporate this erroneous concept of the ‘self’ into metaphysical religious theory. The old animistic systems are outdated and man begins to anthropomorphize metaphysics; there are intelligent human like gods up there and they created us, and unlike the imperfect, changing empirical world of things, man’s ‘spirit’, this second substance, is pure and immutable. It does not die with the body but goes somewhere else.

Fastforward to the age of positivism… where we are at the point of the p-zombie. Philosophers now argue that the way philosophers of the past treated the concept of the ‘self’ is erroneous… they talked about it as if it were a ‘thing’ (thanks Descartes) and applied to it what Ryle called a category mistake. You’ll have to google that because I ain’t about to explain it.

Now we arrive at Wittgensteins beetle in a box (google again). Previously the cartesian model of the ‘self’ proposed that the self was a private entity, something hidden from view, something in others we could not make contact with. Chalmers adds a neat little twist; if there was a private self in that brain, you couldn’t ever find it, because all we can observe is the behavior of others… not their mind. He tries to get around this problem with talk of qualia or Nagel’s ‘the eye that sees but cannot be seen’. There are problems with that too but we won’t go into it here.

Now my point earlier was to emphasize this problem of the private self and the fact that if you were to interact with a robot that could mimic human behavior, you wouldn’t be able to tell the difference between the robot and a real person (you’ll need to check out Searle’s chinese room experiment, too). The cartesian second substance of the spirit, there inside the body, is therefore a null question.

The behaviorists then come along and claim that the argument about ‘mental’ states is not the point. The point is that they are superfluous when only the behavior of human beings is in question. What they are ‘thinking’ is irrelevant, how they act and behave is the only thing accessible to the sciences.

Leave the leftovers for the philosophers chasing their own tails.

A woman of contradictions, I see. In another thread, you claim all energy is sexual. Now all of a sudden, its possible to be intimate, but not “sexually speaking.”