Pass me the salt and Packer, please.

[_LDSToronto]

The easiest way to answer Packer:

"I may not be able to describe how salt tastes, but I can fetch some salt for you to taste. Can you do the same with god?"

H.

[_harmony]

Good luck with that advanced degree, bud.

He didn't need luck. He had access to the tithing trough.

[_zeezrom]

Luckily, in the English language, we have a word for sugary: sweet. If we didn't have the word "sweet", would sugar be used by Packer in his analogy?

I recall that salty does have another word in the Cambodian language (but I have forgotten). Screech? Do you remember? I recall the Cambodian term for salty was "bry" and I think that was different than the word for salt by itself.

Is this a fact of fundamental substances? Like saying green is blue and yellow mixed. Blue is... well it is just blue. The only way to describe blue is to find blue things and say, that is blue. Or, we could use auxiliary terms like cold and sad to describe blue.

[_Blixa]

Luckily, in the English language, we have a word for sugary: sweet. If we didn't have the word "sweet", would sugar be used by Packer in his analogy?

I recall that salty does have another word in the Cambodian language (but I have forgotten). Screech? Do you remember? I recall the Cambodian term for salty was "bry" and I think that was different than the word for salt by itself.

Is this a fact of fundamental substances? Like saying green is blue and yellow mixed. Blue is... well it is just blue. The only way to describe blue is to find blue things and say, that is blue. Or, we could use auxiliary terms like cold and sad to describe blue.

No, it's a function of language. Different languages divide the colour spectrum up differently, even the relation between "green" and "blue." "Hues and Views," an article published by the American Psychological Association, discusses recent work on colour and culture among the Himba tribe of Namibia. Researchers compared the acquisition of terms for colour among Himba and British children:

Across cultures, the children acquired color terms the same way: They gradually and with some effort moved from an uncategorized organization of color, based on a continuum of perceptual similarity, to structured categories that varied across languages and cultures. Over time, language wielded increasing influence on how children categorized and remembered colors.

In short, the range of stimuli that for Himba speakers comes to be categorized as "serandu" would be categorized in English as red, orange or pink. As another example, Himba children come to use one word, "zoozu," to embrace a variety of dark colors that English speakers would call dark blue, dark green, dark brown, dark purple, dark red or black.

In a test, Himba were able to very quickly point out the standout color below:



However, the Himba had a much harder time pointing out the square that English speakers would categorize as a shade of blue:

[_Samantabhadra]

In Tibetan there is a word for "green" (ljang khu pronounced jangu) but it is rarely used outside of a very narrow technical context and signifies a very dark green, a little bit like this.

The much more common word is sngon po (pronounced ngönpo). Ask a Tibetan what color the grass is and they will most likely say sngon po. Ask them what color the sky is, and they will again most likely say sngon po. I'm too lazy to look for the link now, but a few years ago some psycholinguistic research was done in a very similar way to the experiment referenced by Blixa above, with the result that native Tibetan speakers do not process color-signals the same way we do. For further reading on this fascinating topic I suggest Lakoff's Women, Fire, and Dangerous Things.

[_Blixa]

Thanks for the example Samantabahadra. I'll add it to the ones I use when I discuss this in class. Other examples are the Russian words poluboi and sinij which are usually translated as "light blue" and "dark blue," but which refer to different colours not different shades of the same colour. In Welsh, the boundaries between what are rendered in English as "green," "blue," "grey" and "brown," are placed very differently:



(Can you tell I'm prepping for the first day of the semester tomorrow?)

[_EAllusion]

That we can correlate cultural labels for colors to ranges of colors in other languages is actually good reason to think the experience of color is intersubjective. That was the point the original person was trying to get across. The word for the experience of "blueness" is blue. It isn't an ineffable thing that cannot be transmitted to another person. There are people who lack the capacity to sense color and it is hard to get across to them what color is like, but it isn't hard to put on a case to even them that color exists.

[_Doctor Scratch]

For me, this talk from Packer has always seemed rather like the infamous account from (If I recall correctly) Gene Cook, where he supposedly delivered a massive smack-down to Mick Jagger on the subject of the Book of Mormon. Why is it that the General Authorities are often telling these stories where they confront some belligerent non-believer, and they miraculously triumph by publicly humiliating these non-LDS folks? In any case, I wondered why the atheist in the story didn't simply say, "It tastes like the ocean" or "It tastes like tears."

[Guest]

We then confidently tell the questioner that yes we do know. But by the time these words are half way out of our mouth, the quale connected to salt and to all our memories of salt and saltiness have changed together in a way that we cannot detect.
Do we really then know something? What do we know?

It's a good question. Just two nights ago I watched an episode of NOVA about the brain that in part discussed Synesthesia and the common example I guess is seeing numbers in color. These synesthetes can watch a black and white cartoon that displays numbers and they will see the cartoon in black and white except for the numbers, which will all be in color.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Synesthesia

Examples like these are a dime a dozen I'm sure for someone like EA. What kind of "knowledge" is derived from two areas of the brain in close physical proximity that bleed into each other? Do synesthetes have access to objective reality that the rest of us don't? Synesthesia undercuts the testimony. Packer is claiming his salt-like experience actually grounds knowledge in the sense of "third person" propositions such as "there is a God, I know he lives!"

Is there a what-it's-like component to being a synesthete, being a bat, or feeling the spirit? Dennett says no. But, take any of the arguments from those who believe in qualia and they don't help Packer's case. The whole idea for separating propositional knowledge from experience as knowledge is that there's a real rift here, and as propositional knowledge about the world might know nothing about experiencing color, the color experience itself does not give us propositional knowledge about the world. Apologists who go the "personal experience" route misunderstand this rift as one directional. They believe they've shielded their testimony from science, but leave ways for their testimony to stake out claims in propositional territory.

Even if I were to grant BKP making a proposition of the kind: "I know what it's like to be a bat," which I would personally not grant, any victory trades on semantic ambiguities. When thoroughly defining the terms involved in a way to keep the terms restricted to the qualia itself, there would be no crossover, no having the cake and eating it to tell an atheist that there is a God in a way that any atheist would give a rat's ass about.

[_Gadianton]

For me, this talk from Packer has always seemed rather like the infamous account from (If I recall correctly) Gene Cook, where he supposedly delivered a massive smack-down to Mick Jagger on the subject of the Book of Mormon. Why is it that the General Authorities are often telling these stories where they confront some belligerent non-believer, and they miraculously triumph by publicly humiliating these non-LDS folks? In any case, I wondered why the atheist in the story didn't simply say, "It tastes like the ocean" or "It tastes like tears."

I was going to mention something like this but my post was dragging on. I too believe that even if something like this happened, it's a fish story. Packer takes too much pain in getting from point A to point B with the atheist being completely taken at every point and not seeing he's being set up for something.