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Does this mean the experience of pain, sound, color, etc. are illusions?
by goatlover 7y ago
Does this mean the experience of pain, sound, color, etc. are illusions?
- LASR 7y agoWhat does it mean to be an illusion?
- naasking 7y agoThey are an illusion in precisely the same way your car or your day job are illusions: we don't admit any notion of qualia/cars/day jobs into our ontology of physics, and of qualia must ultimately be explained by appealing only to our ontology.
- hackinthebochs 7y ago>the same way your car or your day job are illusions But what work is calling these things illusions doing for you? That they're not fundamental units of the furniture of the universe doesn't mean they don't exist or play necessary causal or explanatory roles.
- naasking 7y ago> But what work is calling these things illusions doing for you? It serves to help distinguish that which is reducible to more fundamental ontological entities, from that which is irreducible and thus ontologically fundamental. I agree that these concepts certainly fulfill useful causal and explanatory roles. Whether they are "necessary" has some room for debate.
- sonusario 7y agoHow do we know when we have arrived at something that is irreducible?
- naasking 7y agoIn a similar manner in which we settle on the primitives of physics theories: parsimony in explaining the available data.
- sonusario 7y agoWhat about "parsimony in explaining the available data" indicates that it is irreducible though?
- naasking 7y agoEvery theory posits some axioms. These are irreducible by definition. The challenge is choosing which axiomatic basis we ought to prefer given our incomplete information. This is answered by induction [1]. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solomonoff%27s_theory_of_inductive_inference https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solomonoff%27s_theory_of_induc...
- sonusario 7y agoSo, is this to say we approach the irreducible best with induction?
- david_w 7y agoWhat you're describing is "the best way to do science, so we can make some progress". That's all well and good but what other people are talking about is the nature of reality which, in pursuit of, those crazy people, they are perfectly willing to doubt axioms. As well they should and as is their right since a set of axioms are effectively ground facts which are selected to make logical reasoning across a domain possible, nothing more. That doesn't make them true in the big sense of True, it makes them expedient, productive of theory, generative, a lot of wonderful things, maybe even strongly implied by all evidence, but not apriori true. They're dubitable.
- naasking 7y ago
- jimmaswell 7y agoYou can only really "experience" the model your brain makes of the world, not the world directly. You end up assuming the world exists and there's no Descartes' Demon.
- someguyorother 7y agoAnother way to put it: the experience is real, but it might be misleading. A hallucination is an experience of something that doesn't exist, but the experience itself does.
- contrapunter 7y agoMisleading in some respects, but overall helpful. Like a computer desktop.
- jkhdigital 7y agoRight... we are just colonies of cells which behave in programmed ways to generate predictable responses from other cells in other parts of the colony who have their own jobs to perform in maintaining the homeostasis of the colony. The illusion of self is useful because it ensures that the collection of cells entrusted with executive functions act in the interest of the entire colony by perceiving it as a unified whole.