[whittingtonaaon]

Philosophy is currently the only subject which can teach us about sentience (which I would define as the ability to experience.) This is because the subject matter of the sciences is the external world. During the scientific revolution, this limitation of science was, however, more generally and explicitly acknowledged than it is today, where there seems to be a lot of confusion about it. A good book on this stuff is Thomas Nagel’s Mind and Cosmos.

I do agree that the terminology is unfortunately convoluted. The main term is “consciousness,” which does often seem unclear to me.

The basic mystery is just the ability to experience/feel, and is an undeniable part of life, for humans and at least some animals.

[mtlmtlmtlmtl]

Oh, I've tried very hard to understand the views of people like Chalmers, Nagel and Goff. My only take-away is that it's just gatekeeping because science has made more advances on these questions in a few centuries than philosophy has in milennia. They want there to be a hard problem, because then they can keep talking about ill-defined problems all day with no progress in sight, publishing papers. Just happy to be workin'

[whittingtonaaon]

But science has never said anything about it at all. The subject matter of science is the externally observable and consciousness is an internal category.

[mtlmtlmtlmtl]

Are you just gonna keep repeating that or do you have an actual argument to support this claim?

[whittingtonaaon]

You’re right. I’m being repetitive. But it’s not really an argument. All I’m doing is saying the definition of science, at least as it’s historically been defined. The only bit of argument I have there is that I think by forgetting this definition we’ve wandered astray.