Tarski wrote:A good deal of what you say might be true in some metaphysically innocent sense.
Well I guess we shall see about that one. It's not like I am making this up- I wish it was, but it is all stolen from other people. The philosophy of subjectivity is pretty well established especially on the continent- I just like to use Nagel because he is obviously in the analytical tradition and more understandable to Americans, and James and Dewey are perceived as "old fashioned" because they are dead. Maybe I will do a thread on some of the phenomenologists to flesh out the subject- object distinction. Kevin I think was right that it I have been singing a one note song for a long time- but I do a lot of repeating because after all that's what preachers do. Not everyone reads the same thread.
The issue as I see it logically is that subjective and objective statements are different language games - any first person statement- a subjective statement- will never be logically equivalent to a second or third person statement. So "He has chemical x in his brain" (or any statement about observed phenomena) will never be logically equivalent to "He is feeling y".
So the point is, if they are not logically equivalent, there is some information contained in one statement that is not contained in the other. You could've course prove some inductive correlation - very strong correlation- but never equivalence. I think that is kind of the bottom line when philosophers talk about "qualia". For me "qualia" are what is NOT included in the physical description. I think. It is a logical, linguistic difference produced by a different point of view.
I mean even an empirical point of view implies an observer- a subject that makes the empirical observation which is subjective until he talks about it, and someone hears that, and now it is "out there". Every scientific discovery has a discoverer. It all starts in somebody's head first.
There is no observation without a point of view, and a brain to verbalize it. And once it is verbalized everyone else has access to that observation if they care to repeat it
I mean Tarski's comments come first from Tarski. What you are thinking about right now about how "wrong" this post is, is totally subjective and unique to your point of view. The fact that you think "Bukowski is wrong" is a subjective judgement- some will agree with it and others won't.
At least that is what I think at the moment.