Psience Quest

(2018-06-29, 03:18 AM)Typoz Wrote: [ -> ]You seem to be ruling out the possibility that altered states from your perspective can include experiencing "what it is like from the perspective of the bat or the other person". That was the very thing which I was suggesting was possible. I guess we'll have to agree to disagree.

I'd be interested in your explanation of how this might happen: how could I shift into an altered state that allows me to feel what someone else is feeling and as only they could feel about it? Perhaps, if we expand awareness to be inclusive of all experience - as, perhaps, it might be for the originator of all that is - then you could well be right. Or, alternatively, I've read accounts of the afterlife life review which describe how we get to feel the effects of our actions as those who were affected by them did. I don't discount those accounts either.

But the point of the proposition of the hard problem is to distinguish things that can be discerned by the scientific method and those things that can't. The argument of materialists like Dennett is that those things we call qualia are, in fact, illusory and that the source of the illusion is reducible to brain function. That is where Chalmers and Nagel (both atheists, by the way) differ fundamentally from the worldview of Dennett and Churchland. In effect, Chlamers and Nagel are saying that mind is not reducible and, on that point at least, I agree with them.

(2018-06-29, 05:40 AM)Kamarling Wrote: [ -> ]I'd be interested in your explanation of how this might happen: how could I shift into an altered state that allows me to feel what someone else is feeling and as only they could feel about it?

Oh, I don't know how. I'm not in a position to provide a recipe or a laboratory procedure. I only say it could/does happen.

Perhaps one example would be within a dream - but I think we need to be careful not to take the same "illusory" route in dismissing this sector of our existence. In my experience, there are a multitude of different things all embraced by the deceptively simple name "dreaming".

I've certainly felt the experience of being someone else during a dream, and it felt very different to my normal experience. It is as though our everyday life is conditioned by the body we inhabit and I had the insight of perceiving from another type of body.

I don't say that this is the only route, it was just one possibility.