Peter Hacker, David Chalmers, Susana Martinez-Conde

We're talking about experience. People were referred to it in CV terms. You know, what's your experience? Tell us a bit about your experience. It can just refer to the things you've done. Uh, but we're going to be looking at it in a slightly more, I guess, philosophical way, you know, experiment, the nature of experience, what did it, what it is to experience things. How are we are in the world, uh, how we process experience, whether it remains mysterious or not. Whether we can subject all of experience too, scientific or philosophical methods or indeed, whether there'll be aspects of experience which will always allude our capacity to, to grasp it.

[@HainishMentat]

Peter Hacker is one of the greatest living philosophers, and I just wish he could have been cloned at birth, so that there could have been one of him to tackle issues of mind and consciousness (as he has), and another to deal with the manifold conceptual muddles in Physics (particularly, the right way to interpret both Relativity and quantum mechanics, and the intersection of these theories with our understanding of time and tense), and perhaps another for issues of alethic modality and other branches of logic, and another for morality (though Hacker has begun to write on that topic). His Wittgensteinean approach to untying conceptual knots, coupled with his limpid Aristotelian eye... it would just make all the difference in the world.

[@Zero4revolution]

We share the same love for Hacker. 😄

[@williamcrooks9561]

We need to get together and continue his methods and work.

[@HainishMentat]

@@5piles There are no meanings of "experience" that permit "experience is part of what is the case" to be a meaningful sentence.

[@alexknollys9009]

@@5piles Equating experience with what you call subjective representation misses the point of what Hacker is saying about the uses of the word experience in our language, it creates unnecessary confusion. I wouldn’t listen to physicists’ understanding of the nature of meaning, that’s a job for philosophers of language I’d say 🤷‍♂️

[@ArcadianGenesis]

I think Hacker is wrong to say that "experience" implies affective qualities. That's just one *kind* of experience. There's also raw sensory experience. What is it like to walk down the street and see the third lamp post on the left? It's like seeing the shapes and colors of everything you saw on the street and the lamp post. What part of that was incoherent, Peter? His point about the word "like" was also irrelevant. The reason for the phrase "what it is like" is that we're talking about sensations, which are said to "feel like" something. What does it feel *like* to be you? This question is just a prompt to describe your experience in familiar terms that anyone can understand. It was "like"

[@thehairblairbunchjones6209]

He doesn’t say that all experience implies affective qualities, in fact he says the opposite explicitly. He only says that it’s only those experiences that are ‘like’ anything. As for your answer to the question of what it’s like to see the lamppost, your answer seems to amount to saying that it’s like itself, which isn’t an answer. When I see your name on the screen it isn’t ‘like’ seeing the letters ‘Arcadian’ in grey against a white background - it is that. That was the point regarding the word ‘like’. People do sometimes say ‘what’s it like?’ when they want you to describe your experience by comparing it to another. But that’s clearly not what Chalmers is talking about. He’s talking about something intrinsic to the experience, not a comparison. I can tell you that coriander tastes like soap and be informative. But if you ask me what each of these is like in itself, and not explained by comparison to a third thing, then there’s not anything left to say. But Chalmers wishes to say that each of us knows ‘what it is like’ in this seemingly ineffable sense, and that is what is philosophically dubious.

[@legron121]

The question "what is it like for you to be X?" assumes you could have been something other than X. You can ask a man what it is like to be a doctor specifically _as opposed to_ something else. But the question "what is it like to be you?" is meaningless, since you could not be anything other than you. It makes sense to ask what it is like for you to be a _doctor_ (as opposed to a non-doctor), or a _musician_ (as opposed to a non-musician), but it makes no sense to ask what it is like for you to be _you_ (as opposed to...... who else could you be?). You don't just so happen to be you and not me, such that one could intelligibly ask what 'being you' instead of 'being me' is like, or how it feels.

[@ArcadianGenesis]

@@legron121 I see your point; you could never know what it's like to be another person. Yet, in principle, it seems there *could* be a qualitative difference between being me and being you. We may never know what the difference is, but there is nevertheless some difference between our feelings of experience. If it *were* possible for us to switch bodies in a science fiction universe, then we would know the difference. Does that make sense?

[@ArcadianGenesis]

@@legron121 "For one thing, 'being me' and 'being you' are not conscious experiences or feelings." I want to push back on this. "Being me" is the totality of all the conscious experiences that are unique to my embodied mind. Different bodies produce different minds. Every body is slightly (in some cases very) different. Therefore, every person's baseline conscious experience will be slightly (or very) different. Even the experience of just sitting here in my chair would feel different to you if you did the same thing in the same context, because you have a different body (and hence a different mind). For example, your proprioception (the feeling of your own body) is different from mine. So to clarify, what I mean when I say "there is something it is like to be me" is "there are tendencies in how I experience the world as a result of my unique embodiment."

[@ArcadianGenesis]

@@legron121 I have no problem with defining the mind as a set of abilities or capacities; that’s perfectly consistent with my view. When I speak of “having a mind” I simply mean “having mental abilities and experiences.” I do not believe the mind is a discrete entity separate from the person or a thing we possess, so there is no need to belabor that point. However, I certainly believe the mind and body have a causal relation. The body determines and constrains the possible space of mental abilities, and manipulating one’s body can influence one’s mental experiences. These are not mere assertions; there is a vast literature on embodied cognition supporting these claims. There is a meaningful distinction between an embodied mind and a disembodied mind. The disembodied mind is the Cartesian conception of a mind that exists totally independent of the physical body, which operates based on pure reason. This conception has influenced many generations of philosophers, and even to this day mainstream cognitive psychology continues to bear the weight of this influence, as mental processes are modeled as purely symbolic architectures with no connection to the physical body. Over the last few decades, there has been a shift toward understanding cognition as embodied, as empirical research has shown that there are many more causal connections between sensory-motor systems and higher-order mental processes than previously thought. Some noteworthy resources on this topic are _The Embodied Mind_ (Varela, Thompson & Rosch 1991), _Being There_ (Clark 1997), and _Philosophy in the Flesh_ (Lakoff & Johnson 1999). “Even though we are bound to have different feelings of overall bodily condition, this does not mean that we never (or cannot) have the very same experience.” How could you possibly know that? Unless you experienced something as another person, you could never know whether you experienced it the same or a different way. If anything, we have very good reason to believe that no two people ever experience the same event in the same way because your current experience is always influenced by your previous experiences, which shape the way your brain cells are interconnected, which in turn shapes the way you interpret information. (In psychology this is called "top-down processing.") Not only that - I would even go so far as to say that no two experiences are alike even _within_ the same person. Sitting in my chair today is a slightly different experience than it was yesterday. “An experience is not made the experience it is (identified) by the bodily feelings that you have while you are having the experience; it is determined by what it is an experience of.” It’s both! Your experience is the interaction of an external stimulus and the internal cognitive/bodily processes that filter the incoming information and determine the particular nature of your experience. To define an experience as a purely external phenomenon seems absurd to me, because it ignores the most important part of the experience - the subjective part. Bodily sensations might seem trivial in your experience of abstract stimuli such as art, but it turns out to be a crucial part of the experience. Experiments have shown that people interpret abstract stimuli differently depending on simple physical variables such as holding a hot object vs. a cold object, for example. Whether you’re aware of it or not, your bodily sensations are tightly coupled with your higher-order cognition. “You do not 'feel' your experiences - experiences are not something felt.” I’m afraid we have different intuitions on this. It is clear to me that my experience is composed of feelings and sensations. It seems perfectly sensible to say “my experience felt a certain way.” How could your experience _not_ feel like anything? That’s the whole idea of qualia and subjective experience. If your experience felt like nothing, you’d be a philosophical zombie.

[@longcastle4863]

Consciousness is just a much more richer and complicated version of a very simple primitive organism having an experience or awareness of there being light or heat in the environment.

[@1330m]

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[@gerhitchman]

David chalmers kinda sucks. Hacker is great

[@rubeng9092]

True