[ExI] Semiotics and Computability

Gordon Swobe gts_2000 at yahoo.com
Tue Feb 9 21:27:17 UTC 2010


--- On Tue, 2/9/10, Christopher Luebcke <cluebcke at yahoo.com> wrote:

Welcome Christopher.

> You'll hopefully forgive my newness to some of the topics
> covered in this amazing group, but is it the case that an
> attempt to objectively describe first-person facts requires
> or equates to a rejection of the notion of consciousness?

I had asserted that the world contains both subjective and objective facts or states-of-affairs. The question came up about how or why subjective facts like toothaches can qualify as empirical facts.

Often when we speak of "empirical facts" we something like "objectively existent facts, verifiable by any observer". I have no objection to that use of the word, but if we understand empirical only in that limited sense then we may find ourselves dismissing real first-person subjective facts as non-empirical and thus somehow unreal or less real than other facts. I contend that the word empirical often does and should also apply to subjective first-person facts. 

There exists for example an actual fact of the matter whether or not you feel hungry at this moment. I cannot know that fact without an honest report from you, but this is no way disqualifies it from having status as a real empirical fact. The fact of your feeling hungry or not has as much reality as does anything objectively verifiable.

-gts
 




      



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