tilthat: TIL a philosophy riddle from 1688 was recently solved. If a man born blind can feel the differences between shapes such as spheres and cubes, could he, if given the ability, distinguish those objects by sight alone? In 2003 five people had their sight restored though surgery, and, no they could not.
nentuaby: I love when apparently Deep questions turn out to have clear empirical answers.
I’ve thought about this my entire life. Just generally, is what and how I see the same as you? It’s obviously a matter of how an individual’s brain interprets something, so we won’t know until we can plant our consciousness in someone else a la Black Mirror.
Even that won’t work. Pretend we’ve figured out how to that. How do we calibrate it? What if I transfer my memories into your mind, but you see the sun as “blue”, and so on in my memories? What if you recall a memory where I’m laughing and smiling, but the emotion I’m recalling is what you would call “sadness”?
Either our subjective understanding of reality differs, or the machine doesn’t work right. The machine faces the same issue as our language does when it comes to reliability of translating internal states.