RE: What are qualia...

From: Thomas Buckner (tcbevolver@yahoo.com)
Date: Sat Jan 22 2005 - 18:41:59 MST


--- Ben Goertzel <ben@goertzel.org> wrote:

> I know of no way to convince a hard-core
> empiricist that the subjectivist
> view of the world is at least equally valid.
>
> What's funny to me is that I see hard-core
> empiricism as a form of
> dogmatism, somewhat similar to religious
> fundamentalism. From an inner,
> experiential point of view, both "God" and
> "physical reality" are ideas that
> the mind conceives in order to organize its
> experiences. Clinging onto any
> one of these ideas as absolutely real and
> existent is IMO a mistake.
>
> -- Ben

This reminds me of Robert Anton Wilson's boffo
line that Martin Gardner was "a high priest of
the fundamentalist wing of the materialist
church." I have sympathies on both sides of this
fence. If only more subjectivists were as precise
and careful about their subjectivity as is RAW
(whose Schrodinger's Cat trilogy sold me on Many
Worlds and primed my brain to receive
Hofstadter).

Tom Buckner

                
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