[ExI] Semiotics and Computability

[Stathis Papaioannou]

On 10 February 2010 10:27, Christopher Luebcke <cluebcke at yahoo.com> wrote:
> Thank you for the background and the welcome.
>
>> 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.
>
> I'm not convinced that a subject's sense of "feeling hungry" cannot be objectively verified. I can verify with perfect accuracy whether a light is red without having to experience "purple", by using instruments; in the same way I expect that it will shortly (in historical terms) be possible to verify, via real-time monitoring of the brain, whether a subject is experiencing "feeling hungry", without the observer needing to experience an identical state of hunger.

We can objectively verify it if we make a correlation between a
self-described mental state and a brain state, but only if we have
that sort of brain state ourselves can we guess as to what it is like.


-- 
Stathis Papaioannou