[ExI] Fwd: Paper on "Detecting Qualia" presentation at 2015 MTA conference

Brent Allsop brent.allsop at canonizer.com
Sat Jan 31 12:09:37 UTC 2015


On 1/30/2015 7:43 AM, William Flynn Wallace wrote:
> One side of this debate says that subjective experiences are 
> metaphysical.  So I have two comments:
>
> 1 - How does one go about proving the existence of something 
> metaphysical?
> By proving that physical causes don't exist for that experience?  
> Isn't that trying to prove a negative?
>
> 2 - Since nothing has ever been shown to be metaphysical (no way to 
> measure it), why would one ever start from that as an assumption?  
> Why, in fact, believe in anything at all metaphysical, in the most 
> literal sense?  Demons and angels? Ghosts?  (It does seem that many 
> people will believe in these things rather than what science says.  If 
> anyone has any doubt that we are an intellectually flawed species, 
> just look at that fact.)
>
> In short, there seems to me to be no way to establish that 
> metaphysical causes exists for anything.  At least, no scientific way. 
> Playing with words, thought experiments, and just sheer sophistry 
> don't do the job.

Either you didn't read the paper entitled "Detecting Qualia" 
(https://docs.google.com/document/d/1Vxfbgfm8XIqkmC5Vus7wBb982JMOA8XMrTZQ4smkiyI/edit?usp=sharing) 
or you didn't understand any of it.   You must have at least read the 
title: "Detecting Qualia", but evidently you refuse to understand what 
most people understand such to mean, as proof by you asserting that 
there is "no way to measure it".  Since you don't seem to get it, I 
guess I'll have to explain it to you:  Detecting, is the same as 
measuring, and if it is detectable, it is physical, and experimentally 
demonstrably to all to be physical, just like all physics.

Brent Allsop


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