There is an old question in philosophy that has occurred to many, many people, and occurred to me in my childhood: is the "green" that I see the same as the "green" that you see? The Dicky-D mentioned this problem in his God Delusion book, as one which is insoluble by virtue of being meaningless and unanswerable; which caused me to ponder that if the Dawkmeister is correct in his materialism (and possibly even if he isn't), he's wrong about this - in principle, if qualia are emergent phenomena of purely materialistic systems, neurology could quantify the experience (well, the brain pattern connected with it), and determine how similar my "green" is to someone else's. Theoretically - I assume it wouldn't be practically feasible - it would even be possible to induce in my brain the neuroelectric state that corresponds to the "green" that you see, and then I could tell for myself.
(This would probably hold true regardless of whether materialism is an appropriate philosophy for discussing human beings, actually. Maybe I should sneak into a combox where I can throw this at Mike Flynn or John C. Wright or Edward Feser or someone similar.)
(Bizarrely, Dawkins introduces the "my green = your green" thing as something unanswerable by science, in order to contrast it with his insistence that science can comment (negatively) on the existence of God, which is backasswardness with a vengeance. [He has an argument that makes God's existence scientifically unlikely, provided you allow him to redefine "God" into something like VGer from the Star Trek movie, but that's another post.])
Wednesday, 4 August 2010
On Hues and Neurology
Labels:
Atheism,
Philosophy
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