You can ask this same question about transmissions between ones subjective experience and ones neurons, and the only serious difference between sams answer and modern answers is that sam makes an unwarranted number of assumptions, and as such must be cut away with ockams razor.
If you really want to feel that you're qualitatively better than sam, you have to bite the bullet and go for full dennett-style functionalism, effectively coming out as a p-zombie, which I personally find quite unpalatable. In the other direction lies lots of other equally weird stuff, like modal realism and panpsychism.
> sam makes an unwarranted number of assumptions, and as such must be cut away with occam's razor.
I agree with you that the logical thing to do with my answer is to cut it away with Occam's razor, and I don't blame you for it.
However, it should be noted that Occam's razor is a general rule of thumb, not some infallible law.
If you were handed a piece of paper with a high level description of how the universe truly works, would you recognize it as the truth or dismiss it as the ramblings of a lunatic?
If you went back in time even a few hundred years and handed the most brilliant thinkers of the day a piece of paper containing just one paragraph about general relativity, how many of those slips of paper would survive Occam's razor?
You're missing the fundamental part about empirical testing.
In the slightly paraphrased words of Dara O'Briain: "Science knows it doesn't know everything, but that doesn't mean you can just 'fill in the gaps' with whatever comes to mind". Claiming that we couldn't recognise an advanced description of our world doesn't mean you can then jump in and say "... and so it's this!".
Likewise, if you were to hand Isaac Newton a paragraph explaining general relativity, something beyond his ability to measure even if he could conceptualise it, there would be no point applying Occam's Razor, because it's not describing something he can detect in the first place.
> Likewise, if you were to hand Isaac Newton a paragraph explaining general relativity, something beyond his ability to measure even if he could conceptualise it, there would be no point applying Occam's Razor, because it's not describing something he can detect in the first place.
Right, so either way, the slip of paper doesn't survive.
I'm not claiming my worldview is empirically testable or even verifiable. I just thought it would be fun to write it down in the off chance that it is true, so that people can later amuse themselves in hindsight.
If you were a scientist in the 1600s, and you read in the newspaper in the anonymous comments section that someone thought that "Time slows down the faster your travel. Time and space are two orthogonal dimensions of the same invisible fabric.", wouldn't it be funny for you to later find out that the random stranger that gave you that forgettable, idiotically insane theory in the paper actually somehow had astonishing insight?
But before anyone took relativity seriously, two things happened:
1. A constant speed of light independent of any reference frame turned out to be a logical consequence of the empirically-verified laws of electromagnetism, and
2. Measurements of the speed of light confirmed that it was constant in all reference frames we were capable of measuring.
Where is the corresponding theory and empirical observations to support dualism?
> If you went back in time even a few hundred years and handed the most brilliant thinkers of the day a piece of paper containing just one paragraph about general relativity, how many of those slips of paper would survive Occam's razor?
I'm pretty confident Newton would get it. He could've verified the speed of light against observations of the moons of Jupiter. He knew about some puzzling aspects of magnets, and was theorising about magnetism while working on optics.
Of course, much better than telling people the answer is telling them which threads to pull, which of the many confusing phenomena in the world bears more investigation.
Your perspective is all wrong here. You can't have a high-level description of how the universe works until it is interpreted as such. Thus if someone gave you a piece of paper, their are far more available interpretations than the two you propose. Most likely, you would simply recognize it as something you don't understand. Like say, exactly what most people do when you hand them a book on QFT. They will neither admit it to be true or lunacy, since they do not have the capacity to judge it as either.
If you had a book that explained how the universe worked, it would either have to explain it in a step-by-step fashion in unambiguous language for your specific consumption, or you're inappropriately putting that spin on it entirely by your own volition.
>If you were handed a piece of paper with a high level description of how the universe truly works, would you recognize it as the truth or dismiss it as the ramblings of a lunatic?
Using false equivalence to convince people that your religious beliefs are correct is unscrupulous to say the least. Your arguments do not prove your claims. It would be better to simply claim up front that it takes a certain amount of faith...then proceed with your story.
This. It's the ugly truth, but it's best to swallow hard, man up, and just straight up admit it. I know nothing, you know nothing, nobody knows anything. Talking about it, pardon me, out of your ass is pointless and just shows how much we have the instinct to control and understand things, even things that are out of our control and understanding. Explains religions, belief in afterlife, belief in a soul, and similar things.
That, and call bullshit when someone tries to convince you of a position shielded by meaningless phrases, obfuscated by scientific words, that just happen to fit exactly in the hole left by our current understanding and that you'll have to wait for death to confirm but they have, somehow, the ability to know.
Bonus points fot telling them to fo if they try to coerce you (or anyone really) by scaring you into believing their nonsense with punishments, in this life and the next one(s).
Isn't that a category mistake? one's subjective experience ~is~ the action of one's neurons. The alternative is, with sam, to grant the existence of an immaterial soul.
That isn't really explanatory to me though. It's like identifying your running operating system with the patterns of electron spins in your hard disk/RAM: while they may be identifiable with each other, that doesn't mean you can derive useful knowledge about one from the other without a huge amount of other information which has little to do with the hard disk itself, and isn't really encoded in it.
The amount of information we need to derive consciousness from neurons could be enormous. My (utterly uninformed) guess is that there are huge frontiers of information theory which need to be crossed first. Similarly to how the discovery of entropy revealed new kinds of knowledge about physical systems, and new ways of obtaining it.
While physics definitely does not have any hiding place for the soul (the relevant energy scales have all been explored,) the interface between biology and information theory is largely unknown, and potentially limitless.
There is something called Integrated-Information Theory which attempts to do that kind of thing, but it doesn't seem to be thought very credible by the experts.
If you really want to feel that you're qualitatively better than sam, you have to bite the bullet and go for full dennett-style functionalism, effectively coming out as a p-zombie, which I personally find quite unpalatable. In the other direction lies lots of other equally weird stuff, like modal realism and panpsychism.
Best to just profess absolute ignorance IMO.