> >Kenneth MacKendrick wrote:
> > >
> > > but when you stub your toe,
> > > you have privileged access to that pain in a way that others don't (this
> > > particular formulation won't be found in Habermas, for good reason
> > > methinks... but I take create delight in formulating it this way).
> Now, if
> > > I am contradicted on this point, then I submit that we aren't living
> on the
> > > same planet.
>
>At the risk of not living on the same planet with Kenneth, I disagree. I
>think the "privileged access" we gave to our own pain is just a matter of
>a convention of not contradicting people about things they are usually but
>not always in a better position to know than others do. But I think we can
>be wrong about just about anything, including self-ascriptions of pain,
>and others can be right about ascribing pain to us when we might deny it.
>Our mental states, even our qualia or raw feels, are not incorrigible. And
>our knowledge and self-ascription of them certainly isn't even if the
>states themselves are. Rorty makes this point very well, although with an
>unnecessarily behaviorist flavor, in Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature.
>--jks
Right right, but the physical reactions passes through your nervous system first. I have a memory of going to the circus, I asked my parents about it and they mentioned that I was two when I had gone to the circus. I have privileged access to that memory, I have relative freedom of interpretation because nothing can contradict that memory. The empirical stuff can be contradicted, but not my memory experience. There is a site of privileged access, we're not connected by empathy wires, nor are we transparent to others. There is something absolutely unique about each one of us - with the possible exception of my quantum double...
Carrol wrote: If that's all you mean, I have no objection -- except that you haven't said anything very interesting (except to neurologists). That private realm you speak of (or at least illustrate here) can only be approached theoretically through neuroscience, and has no direct linkages to any interesting social or "philosophical" question. And incidentally, it is a question which neuroscience has not been able to answer so far (though I think I saw a headline lately referring to some breakthrough).
Again, we have first dibs on the interpretation. Sure, our social and cultural schemas are entwined with our interpretation - nonetheless - it is available to us as individual (even if we don't experience it this way). Socialization and collectivity are just as much products of interaction as individuality.
When we meet people, we don't assume that they are identical (in every way) to us. That's why we fight about stuff. This assumption is a valid assumption. Genetically, we all have our own map - and cognitively, we all have our own experiential transformer.
ken