[hasbroslasher]

> You cannot experimentally decide if atoms experience anything, the fact that they do or don't doesn't change any prediction for how they behave over time. It's meaningless, like wondering if magic exists but is actively hiding from us. Paranoia is that way.

This has so much potential to become a semantic death trap - but let me ask if you think even human experience could be experimentally tested? If you put me in a room, what could you do to see whether or not I'm "having an experience"? Would the mere act of placing me there be an "experience" or would it be a false positive? What does "non-experience" even mean? I don't see it as counterintuitive to suggest that normally inanimate things like rocks can have experiences - though their experiences are fundamentally different than ours. For instance, we will never be smelted, turned into concrete, etc. and rocks don't have memory or feeling apparatus like we do.. but they do "experience" reality on a very simple level.

[ajuc]

> What does "non-experience" even mean?

Indeed, that's why putting meaningless arbitrarily defined touchy-feely words in physics is a bad idea. But I'll try.

Experience = event that changes the model of the world you have in your brain. We can verify it experimentally by for example:

- testing if you associate a loud buzz with food before the experiment (either by looking at neurons that activate when you think of food or by looking at saliva production)

- repeatedly giving you food after buzzing

- testing again if you associate a loud buzz with food

We can deduce from that change that your internal model of the world changed to associate "buzz" with "food" so you experienced our experiment.

This isn't a definition I will defend because I don't think such definitions are that important in the first place.

Now I don't think a stone has internal model of the world, and even if it does - I don't see how can it change. But I cannot experimentally test it :)

[hasbroslasher]

> Experience = event that changes the model of the world you have in your brain

So if I don't have a brain, then I can't have experiences? What if we find aliens out there that don't have brains? Or computers? Are they a-experiential by nature of not having brains, or is it something deeper?

> Indeed, that's why putting meaningless arbitrarily defined touchy-feely words in physics is a bad idea

We're not talking strictly about physics, though. I doubt most physicist professors would not let you bring up questions like these in physics class because they are the subject of an entire field of philosophy. And while there is relevant science to our debate, there's a lot of "soft" arguments outside of the scientific worldview that you should at least read and consider. See Jackson's knowledge argument, Block's Chinese Brain, or Nagel's "what it's like to be a bat" arguments. They "touch" on the uncomfortable ubiquity of things that we "feel" to be outside of a purely scientific view of the world.

> We can deduce from that change that your internal model of the world changed to associate "buzz" with "food" so you experienced our experiment.

This is a bit off kilter. Do people with memory or learning disorders, then, not have "experiences" because they don't learn? What about those who are deaf? You're essentializing consciousness into "ability to learn by hearing and rationally deduction". Computers can take audio input and learn from it with very primitive machine learning models - does that mean that the computer is having experiences akin to our own human experiences?

My advice is to give philosophy its due course! Read up on the touchy-feely stuff because it can be profoundly interesting.

[cameronh90]

Maybe not stones, but what about plants?

https://www.nationalgeographic.com/science/phenomena/2015/12...

[guerrilla]

> We can deduce from that change that your internal model of the world changed to associate "buzz" with "food" so you experienced our experiment.

This is a giant leap to claim that they have a model and experience. You demonstrated that what they have is internal state, i.e. memory, which many machines have. That's what you proved, not that they experience anything.

[ajuc]

I defined experience in such a way that only the existence of the model is required. And it's not hard to prove that they have a model of reality - simply ask them to predict what will happen. They don't even have to be right - any prediction about X means you have a model of X. It might be "everything is random" but it's still a model.

You're free to define experience differently but usually it devolves into defining unknown by unknown.

[hasbroslasher]

> You're free to define experience differently but usually it devolves into defining unknown by unknown.

Many philosophers would suggest that we don't bother "defining" anything at all, strictly because of the tendency for things to devolve into a semantic death-trap. So instead, we just kind of take it for granted that everyone knows what an experience is, at a base level. For instance, it was an Experience to see Jimi Hendrix. However, I definitely have not had that particular experience. There are experiences I could have, such as the experience of going on a roller coaster, or going into space, and ones that I could not have, such as the experience that an anglerfish has when it eats. The question at hand is whether or not these experiences have anything to do with each other, whether there's a "Grand Unified Theory" of experience and consciousness that allows us to make mutual sense of these disparate experiences, or whether there's some limit to what things might constitute an experiment - e.g. the experience of being a rock thrown through a window.

[guerrilla]

> Experience = event that changes the model of the world you have in your brain.

This is not what philosophers of mind are interested in. You're free to define experience differently, but you're not participating in the same conversation if you do.