Re: Uploading

Eric Watt Forste (arkuat@pobox.com)
Tue, 08 Jul 1997 14:48:01 -0700


Since the conversation between John K Clark and Brent Allsop seems to
have collapsed into agreement on a statement that I vigorously disagree
with, I thought I'd just inject a little noise into the system ;)

> "the only feelings I can objectively observe is my own"

Precisely the opposite is true. I can't think of any reason to believe
that anyone could objectively observe anything happening inside the
very instrument they are observing with. One can observe one's own
feelings, but one cannot do so objectively, at least not without doing
great violence to the ordinary-usage sense of the English word
"objective" as it is usually applied to the word "observation".

So the proper statement would be "the only feelings I can never hope to
observe *objectively* are my own". I'm not sure whether this supports
Allsop's point or Clark's, but I'd be interested to see what they think
of it.

--
Eric Watt Forste ++ arkuat@pobox.com ++ expectation foils perception -pcd