They only matter if you assume that they have meaning at all. If you ask me "who am I ?" and I answer that you are a biological entity with such and such processes and are the sum of your experiences, is that answer any less true than a more satisfactory, philosophical answer? I don't think so, because it describes exactly what you are, even if it is unflattering.
It is a less satisfactory answer because it is woefully incomplete. I am not merely a piece of meat. That is only a partial description of me and some of the things it leaves out are very important.
Let me give an easier example of important non-scientific questions with important non-scientific answers. Kant on ethics: How do I decide what is a moral thing to do? Kant's answer: The categorical imperative:
"Act only according to that maxim by which you can at the same time will that it would become a universal law."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Categorical_Imperative
Very simple. Imagine that whatever you do, everybody else did the same thing in the same situation. If the result is a world you would not want to live in, or worse - a world which could not exist because it would be illogical - then you should not act in this way.
There is nothing scientific about this question. It is purely philosophical. But it is not irrelevant, and it refers to something very real - human moral decisions. Few things are more important than this.
You're the one who's making them opposites, Geoff. I've said that subjectivity is a subset of objectivity. Do you have any comment on that ?
Yes. It doesn't make sense.
In what sense is subjectivity a subset of objectivity? Please don't answer the question by providing an argument which is critically dependent on an assumption of materialism i.e. "If materialism is true, then minds are really brains, and brains are objective physical things, so subjective must be a subset of objective." Any answer of this logical form simply begs the question. You need to supply some means of justifying the claim that subjective is a subset of objective which doesn't depend on initially assuming that materialism is true.
Another comment of mine you've ignored: if a machine can read your neural functions and tell someone else that you're seeing red, or that you're happy, and if we could, somehow, display what you see or imagine on a tv screen or even transmit it into someone ELSE's brain, wouldn't that completely destroy the idea that the subjective is beyond the realm of science ??
No. The subjective realm remains hidden from objective view even in your examples. In the first example, we still do not know how the subject experiences red. The second example is more interesting. You are suggesting a telepathy machine. If such a device could be made to work then maybe we could have an inroad into scientific study of the subjective realm. But I don't believe such a machine is logically possibly. The problem is that minds aren't like software. They are content-addressable instead of location-addressable. Your brain doesn't store memories by changing electrical states of a fixed piece of hardware. It (somehow) stores memories withing the very structure of the neurons themselves. If it worked like a computer then you could just collect up the information and establish the same information in the brain of the recipient. But because it is content-addressable, this can't work. It will not be possible to download thoughts into peoples brains because there is no way of creating the correct network of neural connections other than the way they are created by nature. In order to do this artificially we would need to know precisely how the brains neural network stored every bit of information - and A.I. has already demonstrated this is impossible. And if we cannot do it in a computer, we certainly won't be able to do it in a brain. Even if by some miracle we managed to do it, we would then be faced with the problem of artificially recreating the same network in the recipients brain
even though the rest of the recipients brain would be different to the original subjects. That would amount to modifying one part of a neural network without affecting the others. This is completely impossible, as anyone who knows anything about neural networks will confirm. Such a machine is an impossibility.
"Thought" is a material process. No one is positing two things, here.
Then what are you claiming? I presume you aren't just using a double-definition of "thought" to mean two things (this would be a false equivoation).
If you are claiming "subjective experience IS IDENTICAL to a material process" then you are making a claim that these two terms are synonymous. But they are not so, because they have completely different descriptions. If you are claiming "subjective experience IS NOT IDENTICAL to a material process" then there are two things.
Leaving out w/z bosons and gluons is alright, since they don't have much effect at our scale.
