(no subject)
I was just thinking about how you would explain feelings to a robot, alien, or whatever your non-feeling entity of choice happens to be. It'd be easy enough for them to understand it from a scientific point of view as chemical reactions and ancient evolved neural structures or whatever, but I was trying to figure out how you could convey the subjective experience of happiness, pain etc.
I couldn't figure it out, but people have been trying to figure out the mystery of qualia forever, so that's nothing new. This tends to lead people to believe that there's something transcendental and magical about feeling, but I'm considering the possibility that it's just a language problem. The subjective experience of a feeling is an obtuse thing, but it still exists in some way or another, so it should be possible to explain it. I imagine that if we had a sufficiently sophisticated language, it wouldn't be much of a mystery at all.
I couldn't figure it out, but people have been trying to figure out the mystery of qualia forever, so that's nothing new. This tends to lead people to believe that there's something transcendental and magical about feeling, but I'm considering the possibility that it's just a language problem. The subjective experience of a feeling is an obtuse thing, but it still exists in some way or another, so it should be possible to explain it. I imagine that if we had a sufficiently sophisticated language, it wouldn't be much of a mystery at all.