How do atoms build thoughts and emotions?

[A.T.]

Then "what a person is dreaming or hallucinating" cannot be "subjective experiences". Dreams and hallucinations are measurable from the outside with surveys, interviews, journals, and physiological measurements.

I don't consider self reporting to be an objective measurement. Also, as already said, it depends on how specific the "what" is in "what a person is dreaming or hallucinating". These experiences cannot be fully communicated by self reporting:

The question is how far this description can go: It's one thing to correctly detect that a person is hallucinating pink elephants. But it's another thing to make another person experience the same pink that the hallucinating person is experiencing

 

[Dale]

I don't consider self reporting to be an objective measurement.

Hold on now. How can you not consider it an objective measurement? I thought your whole argument was that the subjective experience could not be measured. These are measurements, so I thought you considered them necessarily objective. If I misunderstood and you consider them subjective then your previous statements about the subjective not being measurable do not make sense to me.

I thought you were using “objective” as a synonym for “measurable” and “subjective” as a synonym for “unmeasurable”. And I adopted that convention in my responses. Can you clarify the actual meaning you intend by those terms? Specifically:

If they are not synonyms then what things in a scientific theory of mind would be objective and unmeasurable and what things would be subjective and measurable?

 

[Roberto Pavani]

A single self-report is only one output of the system. In the systems-theoretic sense, observability requires that the internal experiential state be uniquely reconstructible from a sufficient history of inputs and outputs.

 

[gentzen]

A single self-report is only one output of the system. In the systems-theoretic sense, observability requires that the internal experiential state be uniquely reconstructible from a sufficient history of inputs and outputs.

I guess we agree that the complete internal experiental state is not reconstructible.

But many of us pointed out that this is not all an unusual situation in science.

What might be unusual is that we have writings and artifacts of art and religion of our predecessors, and we do know that we can no longer understand their meaning in the same way as the people from the epoch. And we also know that we cannot avoid the same problem with our writings for our descendants.

However, I see the ability of science to hint at possible limits of communication also as part of scientific investigations. And I see the fact that communication can sometimes not be trusted as a totally unrelated fact. The related fact is instead that our interpretation of communication cannot be trusted, if we are unable to reconstruct the original context.

 

[symbolipoint]

Many of the postings in this topic are following one of the signature items of the member @DaveC426913,... about "... let the internet bicker,..."

 

[DaveC426913]

Many of the postings in this topic are following one of the signature items of the member @DaveC426913,... about "... let the internet bicker,..."

Oh, my sig line.

Collins's Law (a flavour of Cunningham's Law): The best way to encourage engagement on social media is not to post an interesting and well-designed problem; it is to post an interesting but ambiguously-defined problem and let the internet bicker over it.