by Max Barry

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Region: Atheist Empire

True catholic bigots

Lord grey ii wrote:Nah. I lack the ability to experience things subjectively. I, of course, appear to be able to to an outside observer.

It depends on what you mean by sentience. Certainly you do experience things in that you have sensory inputs that your brain/ mind operates on. However, you lack qualia, which can be taken as the hallmark of sentience.

What puzzles me is this: Qualia are supposed to be totally private and to have zero causal power. If that isn't the case (if they aren't private and/or do have causal powers) then pretty obviously they make some sort of difference to functional descriptions of brain states, and are open to third-person empirical investigations.

Given that they are allegedly completely private, I can't see how you can meaningfully talk about them, or even meaningfully think about them- there don't seem to be any criteria for distinguishing true statements about your qualia from false statements about your qualia. In Wittgensteinian terms, qualia are beetles in boxes (Section 293 of the Investigations).

Lord grey ii wrote:My end game here is to be proven wrong and promptly point out that I started this whole thing by saying I don't actually exist.

My endgame is to get you to admit that the whole concept of qualia is less than useful, and that philosophical zombies are nonsensical.

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