3 upvotes, 1 direct replies (showing 1)
Nothing we can—or, arguably, even could—observe about the arrangement of atoms constituting the brain allows us to deduce what it feels like to smell an orange, fall in love, or have a belly ache.
Even sentence #2 is an extremely problematic statement. No good can come from a premise like this.
Comment by thisthinginabag at 17/01/2020 at 10:57 UTC
1 upvotes, 1 direct replies
The premise is true. There’s no way to solve the hard problem for reasons outlined here by Gregg Rosenberg:
The skeptic maintains that facts about bare difference are always consistent with the absence of experience, because qualitative contents are not merely structures of bare difference. If we consider that our taste space, for instance, contains different tastes and that our color space contains different colors, the relevant premise is that these tastes and colors are contents instantiating a structure of difference relations, not structures instantiated merely by difference relations.
Of course the skeptic knows that we can catalogue the differences between different colors and different tastes along relevant dimensions. If we do this, we can surely abstract out a content-free difference structure. The skeptic’s objection is to the further move of analyzing conscious qualities into these abstract patterns of difference between them. Rather, our acquaintance with the phenomenal qualities yields information about them as contents occupying slots within these difference structures. Reification of the difference structure as basic ignores the grounding of those differences in each specific case and so ignores the content instantiating those structures.