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I'm responding to "why can't we just take their word for it?" That you and I can come up with different ways to describe our subjective experience in conversat
by hombre_fatal 2y ago
I'm responding to "why can't we just take their word for it?"
That you and I can come up with different ways to describe our subjective experience in conversation doesn't mean that we have a different subjective experience.
Especially not when relayed by a species that's frequently convinced it has a trending mental disorder from TikTok.
- TeMPOraL 2y agoWe can keep talking about it, and assuming we're both honest, we'll arrive at the answer to whether or not our subjective experiences differ. To fail at that would require us to have so little in common that we wouldn't be able to communicate at all. Which is obviously not the case, neither for us, nor for almost every possible pair of humans currently alive.
- hombre_fatal 2y agoOn the other hand, a deep one on one discussion isn't what's happening in casual debates online about to what degree each of us has an inner monologue. And because we don't have so little in common, I would be resistant to concluding that my subjective experience is so different than everyone else's. To claim that I'm different requires me to have an accurate model of what other people are experiencing, not just an accurate report of what I'm experiencing. Look up examples of this on reddit and you'll find a lot of larping. I would take most of it with a grain of salt as you should with any story-telling you encounter on social media. If we're so reliable, there wouldn't be fake mental illness epidemics on TikTok regarding experiences far more concrete than fuzzy notions like inner monologue.