But his "private" sensations are, in a sense, observable to you, are they not? Even over the Internet.
I cannot feel his private sensations. If he hits his thumb with a hammer, I can't feel his pain. if I'm there, I can hear him curse, and watch him waving his hand in the air, all indicative of someone in pain. I can see signs of someone experiencing pain, I can tell you that the neural process that creates the sensation of pain is a physical, biological thing. But of the sensation of pain, I can only feel my own.
Yes, sensing pain comes about in a very materialistic way, but
ouch is a private experience in my own self-consciousness. You can hook me up to machines and measue the infliction of pain upon my nervous system, but my suffering isn't visible to your devices. And if you admit to my suffering, it's an inference on your part based on the evidence of my behavior. You don't feel my pain, thank goodness. Also pain and suffering aren't the same thing. Ask someone who has to live with pain on a daily basis. You wiil fiind that there are times the circumstances that produce the pain and the sensation of it in the consciousness mind are as intense as usual, but for the moment the individual isn't suffering it.
Right now I'm imagining a Kray tree of the sort that grows on the planet Myr, or Sivit Prime. If I described this too you, you could imagine something simillar, but you'd not be doing my imagining or my content of imagination.
Is my Kray tree physical? Sure, all the neurons being fired off to produce this mental image are physical. But is this imagined content physical?
No, it isn't. it's imaginary. There are no Kray trees, There are no Sivits living in their branches, except in stories I wrote. Are stories physical? Are they the same thing as the pieces of paper they are written upon? No. The brain activity that produces my imaginings is physical, but the conent of my imaginings isn't. Sure there's some brain activity that happens every time I imagine a Kray tree. But that isn't a Kray tree. Of course a Kray tree is fictionally physical. Just like it's fictionally a tree. But that doesn't count for physicality unless we cannot tell the difference between the content of imaginatiion and the content of the real world.
There's a maple tree across the street. It's real. it's material. I just took a good look at it. But you don't have access to my sensations of it. If you were here, you could see it for yourself, but while we would be talking about the same objective tree, you mental content wouldn't be the same as mine.
Imagination runs all over the place. Mine takes me out to other planets in other times. Faster than the speed of light, I'm already 258 light years away at the Kohi System in seconds. It's a trival statement about our mental content. It's not bound in space and time, but encompasses space and time within itself. I'm talking about mental content.
Agknowlegding the simple fact that the contents, like the contents of a story, of our mentation aren't physical things and that our sensations and feelings (as such content) are unique to our own self-consciouness and cannot be first person to anyone else, doesn't prove anything metaphysics wise. It doesn't question science. it doesn't prove any woo-woo. You can make that distinction any day and still be a thorugh going Materialist. It's just something to be considered when it comes to metaphysical querstions.
Knowing your own inner, mental, first person content, you can understand why humans, for example, come up with notions of an afterlife, Nothing of such is proven, but you get the psychology of it. The contents of our minds seem to transcend physical boundaries, so that it is hard for us to imagine that someting with the capacity of self-transendence could cease to exist. The "I" of our self-awareness seems ultimately to transcend time and dwell in eternity.
I'm not saying we have a soul that does so. I'm not saying that we physically do so. But if you see the simple difference between the first-person, subjective content of our minds and the third-person content of our environments, then you know why we get into these arguments and why we reach for metaphysical answers.
Science helps, but Science can't call the Metaphysical game excpet to shoot down anything that runs afowl physical reality. Beyond Science we carry on with assumptions and preferences. Even if someone's metaphysic seems more supportive of woo-woo, if the woo-woo in question claims to have a repeatable, marketable product or goods, then it must measure up to scientific testing. If someone describes to me his revelation of the afterlife, I take it that this is an objective place that impacts the physical world. So I need more evidence than that his scriptures say so. At best I can find metaphorical and poetic meaning in his revelation, but not affirm it as objectively real.
In my opinon the objective content area in Metaphysics is small. There are no elaborate systems or content of metaphyics that are objective. The Swedenborgian kind of metaphysics that tells you about the planes of spirit beings is just fantasy. The metaphysical positions discussed in this thread are all viable ones. They are all close to that edge where metaphysics can still play objective.
I just found it very, very strange that my imagined Kray trees, according to "Materialism" or "Physicalism," were physical things.
