Michael

If I say “the thing inside your box has wings” and there’s nothing inside your box then this phrase doesn’t refer to anything. Or if there’s more than...

What does it mean to correctly see that property? I don't think it correct that 500nm light looks the way it does to us. I don't think it correct that...

I would say we understand pain because we experience our own, and we’re smart enough and sympathetic enough that we assume that other people experienc...

No, I think that when I talk about what I am feeling I am referring to what I am feeling, and that you cannot feel or see or smell or taste my feeling...

if you have a locked box that I can’t look inside, the phrase “the hidden contents of your box” refers to the hidden contents of your box. I don’t und...

I wouldn’t say it’s elusive. I’d say that my first person experience is the most self-evident thing there is to me. And I have no reason to believe I’...

I’m sorry but I just don’t understand what you’re asking.

And it might be a physical fact that a sufficiently advanced brain will cause first person experiences.

I don't understand the issue. If I say that it's an unavoidable, deterministic consequence that heating an ice cube above 0 degree celsius will cause ...

Certainly a logical possibility. Maybe not a physical possibility. It could be that first-person experiences are an unavoidable, deterministic consequ...

I dispute that requirement. I can talk about the future.

How so? I don’t need to experience something to talk about it.

Consciousness, whatever it is, doesn't extend beyond the brain, and so it's physically impossible for an apple and its properties to be "present" in m...

But the stuff that's constructed by the brain's processing isn't stuff that's in or on the apple. And I mean that in a very real, physical sense. My b...

You're going to have to explain the connection there. What does not being able to access something have to do with not being able to talk about that t...

The full quote was this: Seems pretty clear that he's only saying that because we can't experience another person's experiences we can't know what it'...

This is where you equivocate. To say that an experience is private is just to say that no-one else can experience it. It says nothing about who can or...

I didn't say that only I can refer to it. Pain is a thing inside my head that we can both refer to.

I'd say it's the label given to the contents of the box. That's why we use the word "private" in the phrase "one's own private thought". If it was a l...

I'm not saying that only I can refer to my pain. You can refer to my pain as well. My feeling of pain is private in the sense that only I can feel it....

Again you seem to be equivocating. I'm not saying that there's a language that only I can understand. I'm saying that words can refer to things that o...

Why not? If a phrase like "one's own private thought" can refer to one's own private thought, then why can't a word? Is there some bizarre condition t...

You're equivocating. We might use the word "private" to mean "something that can't be talked about" or we might use the word "private" to mean "someth...

That's what I reject. Just because it only happens inside my head isn't that I can't talk about it. Just because you can't see the contents of my box ...

You make the same inconsistent argument that Banno made above. Presumably the phrase "your own private thought" refers to my own private thought.

These seem like inconsistent claims. You start by referring to my pain, seemingly accepting that it’s inaccessible to you, and then say that you can’t...

Don’t quite get what you mean. When I talk about the beetle in my box my words are referring to the thing inside my box. The thing inside my box is wh...

Now imagine I was shown a copy of what is in your box. Would I recognise it as being a beetle? Only if it looks like what’s in my box. Irrespective of...

By private phenomena I don’t mean phenomena that can’t be talked about. I mean phenomena that “happens” to one person but not to another. When the per...

I still don’t understood what you mean by “private”. It sometimes seems that by it you mean something that can’t be talked about, in which case it’s a...

And the critter tells me that the water is green. So why is that evidence that he means something different by the words “red” and “green” but the per...

I can’t, that’s the point, just as I can’t tell that someone sees the number 7 as red. But people really do see the number 7 as red, much in the way t...

I suppose we can’t know for certain, but we can make reasoned assumptions. We know that the same kind of stimulus causes in ourselves the same kind of...

I think there’s a distinction between sense and reference. It may be that the sense of a word is public, but I think sometimes its referents are nonet...

I’m saying that the colours they see and talk about are private to them.

How does Wittgenstein account for something like synesthesia? Some people talk about sounds and numbers having colours. It’s certainly a non-standard ...

Might be all I am to them, but it's not all I am.

It shows, as it says, that "color is in the perceiver, not the physical stimulus" and "color is a perceptual construct that arises from neural process...

I've already given one example:

It's inconsistent with the empirical evidence, and as I said, theories need to fit the facts, not the other way around. The empirical evidence is that...

You just admitted to an internal, physiological sense of feeling pain. Why is it so difficult for you to extend this to other things, e.g. seeing colo...

It’s not woefully inadequate. It explains colour blindness and synesthesia and why some people see the dress to be white and gold and others black and...

Yes. The broken leg is the trauma. The brain activity (or the mental phenomena it causes) is the pain.

And yet as I said we can recognise trauma without feeling pain (e.g. congenital insensitivity to pain) and we can feel pain without recognising trauma...

We (usually) feel pain in response to trauma. They are two separate things. The person with congenital insensitivity to pain can recognise the trauma ...

I don’t need a language to be in pain. Pre-linguistic humans had headaches. What I thought you were saying is that feeling pain can be reducible to br...

Very divergent, e.g. in the case of synesthesia. Whereas most of us only see colours in response to light, some also see colours in response to sound ...

Theories need to fit the facts, not the other way around, and it is a fact that the pain I feel isn't a property of the fire that causes me to feel pa...

I don't understand your question. I don't know much about why putting my hand in the fire cases me to feel (in the former) sense pain. I just know tha...

The epistemological problem of perception concerns the relationship between the phenomenology of experience and the mind-independent properties of ext...