[hcarvalhoalves]

> If we could look at all the pieces leading up to experience under a microscope, I still don't think there would be a way of seeing someone's experience or subject it to proper scientific scrutiny short of actually being that someone.

See... but if you take a connectionist approach, it should in fact validate your intuition that you can't experience like someone else short of being them.

Making an analogy with neural network models, you can't transfer the weights from a network to another with a different structure and expect it to produce the same states. The experience imprints in the structure, and from that structure emerges the experience. And that's a ridiculously simple model, with ideal neurons and nothing else in the organism modeled... imagine the richness of behavior of the real thing.

I don't know... maybe it's our bias to believe matter is messy, filthy and mundane and that our consciousness, all the richness of our thoughts and emotions can't be explained only by it... but I actually find no less fascinating to think that is from structure alone that may arise sentient beings capable of living and breathing and feeling, out of the same atoms you find in the dirt.