Re: Is Doug's chair really red?

[stewarte@ucscc.UCSC.EDU (The Man Who Invented Himself)]

rossi@NUSC.NAVY.MIL ("ROSSI JOHN") will no doubt deny ever having said:

>That is, Doug is correct in his
>assertion that we should consider it a fact that he sits in a red
>chair if any of us would agree that his chair is, indeed, red after
>looking at it.  

Okay...

>Although
>this is semantically similar to his postulation that agreement on
>quality of subjective experience also constitutes "truth", it is, indeed,
>quite different.  The meer fact that appreciation of quality remains
>totally subjective, the experience can not really become a matter
>of public demonstration (as is the color of his chair).  No matter how
>many people agree on a subjective experience, such data do not
>constitute "facts".  Subjective experience remains that.

It seems to me you are disclaiming |>oug's assertion without any support
for your position.  In what way is it quite different?  Quality can
certainly be a matter of public demonstration; if you asked people on
the street whether the Mona Lisa was a good work of art, I'll bet that
you'd get very few who would say no.  Probably as few as would declare
that Doug's chair isn't red.  Some folks would probably say yes just
because they know that they're supposed to think that the Mona Lisa is
good.  

What we call subjective experience is what we perceive through our 
senses, filtered through our value systems.  What we call objective
is ostensibly unfiltered by those values.  However, it is not at all
clear to me that this latter is possible in any real sense.  Many types 
of insanity or chemical mind alteration cause people to experience
things quite different from "normal" reality -- we often view this
as a distorting layer between them and reality.  Perhaps our "normal"
minds also present such a distorting layer.   Who can say?  Ultimately,
we have no data that is not subjective, at least in the sense of 
coming from our own perceptual systems. 

-- Stewart
-- 
"Don't forget this shit."
			 -- James Blood Ulmer
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