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Because unlike everything else in the body, we don’t know what sort of material explanation would possibly work. Instead assertions are made that subjectivity i
by goatlover 6y ago
Because unlike everything else in the body, we don’t know what sort of material explanation would possibly work. Instead assertions are made that subjectivity is identical to certain kinds of brain activity. What is needed as an explanation for how brain activity is conscious. How does neural activity result in the feeling of pain or experience of seeing a color?
- Retric 6y ago> How does neural activity result in the feeling of pain We can design synthetic chemical painkillers that work, suggesting at for this we actually know what’s going on. You can actually look up how these neurotransmitters etc work. If you somehow want to suggest something else is going on you really need to support that argument extensively.
- goatlover 6y ago> You can actually look up how these neurotransmitters etc work. Which doesn't explain having an experience of pain, only that certain neurotransmitters are involved which can be suppressed.
- Retric 6y agoSure it does, the signal is the feeling. You are your body, so when your body sends a signal that is you feeling something.
- disgruntledphd2 6y agoBut how come people have different pain thresholds then? I did a bunch of research on pain some years ago, and in order to "standardize" it, one would apply a treatment when the person said pain was greater than 7 out of 10 on a scale. If pain were measurable "objectively", this wouldn't be necessary.
- Retric 6y agoPeople are not uniform templates using identical DNA and histories. Our bodies are different which means our subjective experiences are different. That’s both consistent and expected. As to measurement, we can design and build modern CPU’s but can’t inspect them in full speed operation. Similarly, mechanics often need to take something apart to test it. Living organisms present a more complex challenge, but the similarities are obvious.
- disgruntledphd2 6y agoYes, but we cannot measure pain "objectively" at all. The equivalent would be if we could build a CPU, but could only determine how fast it could process by asking it to rate its processing power on a scale of 0 to 10.
- Retric 6y agoNothing is stopping a more technologically capable civilization from directly measuring our pain. You’re describing a purely technical limitation. We have plenty of ways of directly measuring people‘s brains and CPU’s energy use etc. The issue is speed and resolution which is hardly a philosophical limitation.
- danans 6y ago> But how come people have different pain thresholds then? Different signal sources and also differently configured/trained systems receiving and interpreting those signals. But practically, it makes more sense to use the instrument already evolved and trained by their own experience to measure their pain: the person themselves.
- disgruntledphd2 6y ago> Different signal sources and also differently configured/trained systems receiving and interpreting those signals. I think that this is a little too general a statement, given that it could be used to describe almost any human variability.
- Natsu 6y ago> Because unlike everything else in the body, we don’t know what sort of material explanation would possibly work. I think that the closest we have to an explanation for something capable of thinking are CPUs and we're just not sure what the right software is to create independent thought. This might imply that traits like universal computation are necessary (but not sufficient) for thought.