I thought here was a lot of research already done on subjective experience.
Studies showing people have dismal accuracy in their recall of eyewitnessed events and that type of thing. How their preconceived notions can influence it... Interpretation of facial expression or tonal inflection.
Then again, I could be wrong. It's just an inpression I have.
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Chained out, like a sitting duck just waiting for the fall _Cage the Elephant
I thought here was a lot of research already done on subjective experience.
Studies showing people have dismal accuracy in their recall of eyewitnessed events and that type of thing. How their preconceived notions can influence it... Interpretation of facial expression or tonal inflection.
Then again, I could be wrong. It's just an inpression I have.
The inaccuracy of human memory is certainly well established by this point. The mere act of thinking about a memory changes the memory, which is why witness tampering is a serious problem and so on.
I've actually written in pretty great detail about the subjectivity of human experience, but I'm just super busy lately, so I don't really have time to take this thread seriously. It is an interesting topic, but I don't think it's anything most of us haven't already discussed to death. Hence my snarky responses earlier on and mostly just [thanks]ing posts from the sidelines.
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Cēterum cēnseō factiōnem Rēpūblicānam dēlendam esse īgnī ferrōque.
“All for ourselves, and nothing for other people, seems, in every age of the world, to have been the vile maxim of the masters of mankind.” -Adam Smith
I thought here was a lot of research already done on subjective experience.
Studies showing people have dismal accuracy in their recall of eyewitnessed events and that type of thing. How their preconceived notions can influence it... Interpretation of facial expression or tonal inflection.
...
Yes, but such studies presume the existence of subjective experience.
The amount of scientific evidence backing up the existence of subjective experiences is, to my understanding, roughly comparable to the amount of scientific evidence backing up anthropogenic global warming or germ theory. You might as well be saying "evolution is just a theory".
I'm not even close to being this message board's biggest expert on biology (hi, The Lone Ranger!) but it's well established that the brain filters out signals it regards as irrelevant purely in order to enable concentration. If we didn't, we wouldn't be able to, for example, have conversations with each other over background noise. The brain filters noise out from signals, and it does this entirely subconsciously - we don't even notice it.
Because of this, our experiences are inherently subjective. We don't actually absorb everything our senses take in. But it doesn't stop there. The brain filters out material as irrelevant based on its experiences of what is and is not relevant - in other words, our memories. Which were formed based on subjective perceptions, and because we've been constructing our own internal narratives based on those memories, this means that we are experiencing the world subjectively twice over - superficially, our in-the-moment experiences are subjective, but the filtering that occurs is itself a result of subjective perceptions.
And it still doesn't stop there! As I mentioned, the act of thinking about a memory changes the memory. This means that we are constantly revising our life stories. There is, as a result, no such thing as an entirely permanent self - personal identity is not merely subjective but also constantly changing. We like to think of ourselves as rational beings with essentially good motives, but on the whole, we make decisions based on impulse and then rationalise them after the fact.
The best one can hope for is to be aware of the subjectivity of one's perceptions and trying to revise one's understanding of the world on this basis. It still won't be a perfect perception of the world, but being aware of the fallibility of one's own perceptions makes a person a more reliable observer than they would otherwise be.
This is a particularly sore spot for me right now because I am currently dealing with depersonalisation-derealisation disorder, a psychological disorder that directly affects my subjective perceptions of the world - more specifically, it results in my feeling personally dissociated from reality, as though I were a character in a novel or a television show rather than a living, breathing human being. I experience events as though they were happening to someone else; my perception of time is greatly distorted, and my recent memories feel impersonal, as though they are someone else's memories. I have also, for the first time, begun having synaesthetic experiences with music, which has literally been the only pleasant upside of my altered mental state. If human perceptions were not subjective, this disorder would not even exist. There are numerous other clear cases of evidence of how humans perceive reality differently from one another (hell, synaesthesia more generally is a wonderful example), and I'm not going to bother listing all of them; that would probably be a book in and of itself.
Beyond this, I would posit that humans' inability to recognise the subjectivity of each other's experiences (and their own) is a root of an awful lot of problems in society. For example, "I haven't noticed harassment happen" should not be taken to imply "Harassment isn't a problem", but far too many people take it exactly that way.
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Cēterum cēnseō factiōnem Rēpūblicānam dēlendam esse īgnī ferrōque.
“All for ourselves, and nothing for other people, seems, in every age of the world, to have been the vile maxim of the masters of mankind.” -Adam Smith
The amount of scientific evidence backing up the existence of subjective experiences is, to my understanding, roughly comparable to the amount of scientific evidence backing up anthropogenic global warming or germ theory. You might as well be saying "evolution is just a theory".
Then your understanding has misled you. I'm not disagreeing with the rest of your post, which has many strong points. I appreciate your willingness to take this issue seriously.
You say there is a lot scientific evidence showing whether or not a given structure or system undergoes subjective experience. As much evidence as what shows germ theory or global warming! Okay, show me.
You've already admitted that we don't have an instrument that can monitor some object and indicate whether or not it is having subjective experiences.
So presumably the evidence is only going to come in the form of people explaining their opinions and saying that they think the best explanation of how, say, a dog behaves, is that the dog is having the same sort of subjective experiences that the people believe they have themselves.
Virtually the entire disciplines of psychology and psychiatry are predicated on the understanding that personal experiences are subjective. Just as modern medicine wouldn't exist without germ theory, modern psychology wouldn't exist without the subjectivity of human experience. I'm not going to provide a rundown on evidence that can easily be found with a quick Google search; I don't have time for that.
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Cēterum cēnseō factiōnem Rēpūblicānam dēlendam esse īgnī ferrōque.
“All for ourselves, and nothing for other people, seems, in every age of the world, to have been the vile maxim of the masters of mankind.” -Adam Smith
See that's the thing with the obtuse flighty answers, I don't know if you're talking philosophically, or more literally, or what.
If we're talking literally and biologically the answer is, yes of fucking course!
To expand on vision a bit. The reason you can't shove a 50 megapixel camera into your eyesocket hook it up and have bionic vision is because we've discovered the eye processes the data right away into complex contrasts and already starts to collect motion and depth data. There's about a 10:1 reduction of data from the retina to the optic nerve. It's not possible to spit an array of pixel data down the optic nerve and see properly. From the eye it gets organized and processed a bit and sent to the primary visual cortex and on to the secondary visual cortex and up to more complex things like spatial mapping and object recognition. Although it's important to note there are small but important connections that zip off to multiple areas of the brain before the visual cortex.
Your primary visual cortex acts in some ways as a theater screen being projected on, and I do mean this somewhat literally as areas in your field of vision can be mapped to areas in the primary visual cortex. Damage to this area of the brain causes blindness in matching mapped areas of vision.
Actual monkey brain tissue "exposed" like film through the eyes of the monkey.
No, don't get too excited about somehow being able to take pictures with brains (I know, I know) the primary cortex is just the first step in vision processing and helps to collect spatial mapping data as well as reacting to and processing a number of different basic stimuli like the orientation and direction of movement of striped bands or contrasts. Here again we see that while we're used to thinking of vision as looking at images, or movies, movement data is extremely important and is processed along with the complex static details.
Of course you don't experience a bunch of edges, contrast gradients, and the like but a scene of distinct complex items of mass and movement, in varied degrees interaction and interplay with each other. Vision is more than just seeing an image, vision is a complex experience. More complex than what your eyes bring in alone because here's the cool thing, you're always hallucinating just a little. Oh you never know because there's an interplay between incoming visual data and the data your brain is adding to help it along, but it's certainly doing some adding. Brain scans show when people dream or hallucinate the visual system is active at least as far back as the primary cortex, so even as far back as edge movement orientation data your fore brain is able to adjust or just feed in purely non eyeball gathered data, and once processed this data becomes the thing you ultimately see.
Optical experiments,
Spoilered for annoying flashing static image.
Are you able to see the 2 superimposed in this image?
Think about what it would be like to see a nice bold 2 in that image envision seeing the 2, concentrate on seeing it… see it now?
Of course there's no 2 actually there, but you can prime your brain to so want to see a 2 that it starts to send signals all the way back to your edge detection networks and you start to detect the edges of a 2.
Oh I forgot to add the interesting Charles Bonnet Syndrome, where people with vision loss due to eye damage and ageing will experience simple to complex hallucinations in the empty area of view, since sometimes without a solid signal the brain will just get too excited and make shit up. Often cartoon like but it can also be 100% realistic looking, but they generally know the images aren't real and there's never any sound attached to them.
In this way we know that vision is a culmination of a neurological process that can be completely recreated inside the brain, and if left to twiddle it's thumbs, that's exactly what it will start doing.
You've already admitted that we don't have an instrument that can monitor some object and indicate whether or not it is having subjective experiences.
So presumably the evidence is only going to come in the form of people explaining their opinions and saying that they think the best explanation of how, say, a dog behaves, is that the dog is having the same sort of subjective experiences that the people believe they have themselves.
You identify the problem. We don't know how to detect the existence of SE, so all we get is opinion.
So what sort of evidence should we look for now? Hence the thread title. Doesn't it seem strange to you that there is something we know exists and yet we have no way of showing whether it does or not?
...
Virtually the entire disciplines of psychology and psychiatry are predicated on the understanding that personal experiences are subjective. Just as modern medicine wouldn't exist without germ theory, modern psychology wouldn't exist without the subjectivity of human experience. ...
That's true. Hard science about the bouncing atoms, and soft science about flaky human 'feelings' and whatnot.
You identify the problem. We don't know how to detect the existence of SE, so all we get is opinion.
So what sort of evidence should we look for now? Hence the thread title. Doesn't it seem strange to you that there is something we know exists and yet we have no way of showing whether it does or not?
No, it doesn't seem strange to me at all, because there are plenty of other things we know exist but can't explain or have never even observed. We have no idea what dark matter or dark energy are and have never even observed them, but scientists are largely certain that they both exist, because otherwise, large percentages of the universe's mass and the expansion of the universe respectively are completely unaccounted for. Similarly, we know gravity exists, but we're still not certain why (relativity posits that it's a distortion of the spacetime field, but as far as I understand, it's still not understood why mass would distort the spacetime field, and relativity only provides a large-scale explanation that completely breaks down when one attempts to do calculations about small gravitational interactions. It's also hypothesised that gravity is caused by as yet unobserved, massless particles called gravitons). Human perception, in addition to being incredibly imperfect, has yet to come up with satisfactory explanations for a large number of everyday phenomena.
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Cēterum cēnseō factiōnem Rēpūblicānam dēlendam esse īgnī ferrōque.
“All for ourselves, and nothing for other people, seems, in every age of the world, to have been the vile maxim of the masters of mankind.” -Adam Smith
You identify the problem. We don't know how to detect the existence of SE, so all we get is opinion.
So what sort of evidence should we look for now? Hence the thread title. Doesn't it seem strange to you that there is something we know exists and yet we have no way of showing whether it does or not?
No, it doesn't seem strange to me at all, because there are plenty of other things we know exist but can't explain or have never even observed. We have no idea what dark matter or dark energy are and have never even observed them, but scientists are largely certain that they both exist, because otherwise, large percentages of the universe's mass and the expansion of the universe respectively are completely unaccounted for. Similarly, we know gravity exists, but we're still not certain why (relativity posits that it's a distortion of the spacetime field, but as far as I understand, it's still not understood why mass would distort the spacetime field, and relativity only provides a large-scale explanation that completely breaks down when one attempts to do calculations about small gravitational interactions. It's also hypothesised that gravity is caused by as yet unobserved, massless particles called gravitons). Human perception, in addition to being incredibly imperfect, has yet to come up with satisfactory explanations for a large number of everyday phenomena.
We can demonstrate that gravity exists. How do we demonstrate that a thing has feelings?
You identify the problem. We don't know how to detect the existence of SE, so all we get is opinion.
So what sort of evidence should we look for now? Hence the thread title. Doesn't it seem strange to you that there is something we know exists and yet we have no way of showing whether it does or not?
No, it doesn't seem strange to me at all, because there are plenty of other things we know exist but can't explain or have never even observed. We have no idea what dark matter or dark energy are and have never even observed them, but scientists are largely certain that they both exist, because otherwise, large percentages of the universe's mass and the expansion of the universe respectively are completely unaccounted for. Similarly, we know gravity exists, but we're still not certain why (relativity posits that it's a distortion of the spacetime field, but as far as I understand, it's still not understood why mass would distort the spacetime field, and relativity only provides a large-scale explanation that completely breaks down when one attempts to do calculations about small gravitational interactions. It's also hypothesised that gravity is caused by as yet unobserved, massless particles called gravitons). Human perception, in addition to being incredibly imperfect, has yet to come up with satisfactory explanations for a large number of everyday phenomena.
We can demonstrate that gravity exists. How do we demonstrate that a thing has feelings?
The Man is seriously all full of good points and stuff, and yet you went and broke him.