OuterLimits wrote:Terrapin Station wrote:All I'm saying is that we have empirical evidence of being brains in human bodies and houses and so on, whether that empirical evidence is just phenomenal data or not. We do have that at least. And that's more than just possibility.
I have the subjective experience of things, people, and houses.
I just have no "empirical evidence" of what causes me to have those experiences experience (real objects out in the world vs computer code somewhere).
I think we agree that the subjective experience doesn't amount to "empirical evidence". The main error so many people make is in the use of the word "we". If you ask yourself, instead, what do "I" experience and what does that tell "me" about the nature of reality, you might get into the spirit of this.
It seems you are taking the subjective experience and labeling it "empirical evidence". If you would stop doing that (or alternately explain why you are doing it) then things might move along.
This response tells me two things:
(1) That you've not understood at least some of what I've been writing, and
(2) That unfortunately you've not bothered to tell me that you've not understood at least some of what I've been writing and consequently asked for clarification.
Those two things in conjunction make it very difficult to have a conversation like this.
I said a number of times, not just in this thread, that phenomenal data/phenomenal experience IS empirical evidence. I even said it again in the post that you're quoting and responding to immediately above: "whether that empirical evidence is just phenomenal data or not"--in other words, the empirical evidence in question
can only be phenomenal data.
What is phenomenal data or experience? It's what you're calling subjective experience. That IS empirical evidence. "Empirical" refers to something arrived at via experience or observation. Surely you're not saying that subjective experience isn't experience or that you do not observe it, right? You experience people, houses, etc. Well, that IS empirical evidence of (it is experience of/observation of) people, houses, etc.
What you're noting is that you do not know with certainty what the cause of that empirical data is. But what I keep telling you over and over is that my whole point here is that worrying about certainty isn't the approach to take when we're doing epistemology.
Re "getting into the spirit of this," it's not that I'm not familiar with the standard way of looking at this, by the way, where we treat Decartes like an epistemological genius, etc. and where we conclude, "Yeah, we could just as well be the dream of an evil demon" etc. I'm saying that that approach is inane, it's indicative of a neurotic concern with certainty/needing to be "absolutely" correct, and focusing on that part of both Descartes' and Putnam's ("brain in a vat") arguments misses not only the point of epistemology in general in my opinion, but the point of their arguments, which is in both cases how that sort of misconceived skepticism is or can be overcome (with different answers to that in both of their cases). The brain in a vat argument is often misunderstood as being a skeptical challenge, when instead, in Putnam's view, the whole point was to undermine such skeptical challenges as more or less incoherent. (I don't happen to agree with either Descartes' or Putnam's solutions to this, by the way--Descartes' is primarily based on beliefs about God, whereas Putnam's is largely based on his semantic (meaning) externalism, but nevertheless, the points of their arguments aren't that the skeptical view is just as good as the dismantling of such views.)