I think what is being suggested is that the first-person experience is immaterial, as it is unobservable and unmeasurable. Yet, I invariably insist that it will be possible eventually to observe and measure the first person experience of each person.
"Here, I want you, the members of the jury, to know exactly what our client felt, the night her husband left her." *jury members slip their fingers and earlobes into complex machines. Several, in unison, cry an identical cry of pain and anguish. Most look betrayed, bewildered...*
I think it's just a matter of time. Eventually, we CAN and WILL reduce the totality of our universe to measurable and comprehensible facts - nothing AT ALL will exist beyond it.
After all, the first person experience is nothing if not the near-infinitely complex interactions of neurons and other bits passing energy this way and that, forming and reforming protein chains, and zapping each other with energy. All this forms the 'first person experience' and could probably be adequately duplicated, eventually.
I'll have to find it again, but there was a very interesting study done, where rats were taught how to navigate through a maze, using peanut butter as incentive and electrical shocks as detractors. RNA from their brains was extracted, and injected into new rats - who took considerably less time learning the maze than the original test subjects. This suggests to me that some experience of the first person is stored in a physical materia and could be transferred.
What you seem to me to be doing, is making an assumption based on the state of knowledge as it stands right now - which is certainly nowhere near complete, accurate, or total. "We cannot measure singular experience right now, so it must be immaterial." Well, we cannot measure LOTS of things, but since we experience the effect they have on the world, we know they exist and are therefore materia. Likewise, each of us experiences the first person view, so we know it exists and has materia. If it didn't, we wouldn't know it exists.
Believe me, I've been where you are right now, wondering about hte dynamics of such concepts as 'I see red' or 'I feel pain'... But shortly thereafter, I ditched this immaterialism in favor of the pursuits of puberty, and when I returned to the philosophos, I found the concept sophomoric and juvenile. Of course we feel pain, of course we see red. But given time, we will all know how to feel and see as others do. All we lack right now is a frame of reference and the tools to apply this transfer.
Another thing to consider, is that we're tackling a project that relies heavily on semantics. If I say I see red, you don't know exactly what it is I see, but since we share a common experience as to what red is, you can be safe to assume that my optic nerve is detecting light refracted into red wavelengths, and know what that color looks like. But if you tell me you see puce, I have NO idea what you're talking about. Is it green? Blue? Purple? I don't know - I can't share your experience. Is puce, therefore, immaterial? Of course not. Is our perception of puce immaterial? Of course not.
To use the 'I feel pain' example, the fact is that each of us comes with our own definition of pain. This complicates the matter considerably. But when we further define what we feel, 'I feel a burning, focused pain in my shoulder', this helps further define the feeling, and pinpoint exactly what in our experience this pain must be like. When we have a) the exact language or method to transfer the data and b) a broad enough experience base to interpret the data, we'll learn that our 'subjective' view ammounts to nothing more that physical, chemical, and neurological interpretation of materia input - nothing mystical or immaterial about it.
