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[junglesky]

I was just thinking about how you would explain feelings to a robot, alien, or whatever your non-feeling entity of choice happens to be. It'd be easy enough for them to understand it from a scientific point of view as chemical reactions and ancient evolved neural structures or whatever, but I was trying to figure out how you could convey the

Comments

[afx]

As a reductive materialist I agree with your first statement but don't know exactly what you mean by the second. In order for them be describable in subjective terms, they must be reducible to component processes or elements. If they are distinct subjective states (emotions), how could any reduction take place?

[beefive]

I had a dream about this the other night. I went outside my flat and was overwhelmed by the smell of freshly bloomed roses; it had what I can only describe as a mysterious effect on me. It not only smelt 'good,' or reminded me of other associations e.g. spring, but in and of itself it was compelling and gave me a particular feeling of having discovered something essential, just by the smell; I would have been happy to stay inside that feeling forever, though I couldn't because the smell came and went. Then some colleagues came round and started talking about the roses, and recognised their importance, and so they made armies (they turned out to the Lancastrians and the Yorkists, War of the Roses) whose shields bore images of the roses on them as a symbol - a symbol of what I had experienced. We passed through time (history, maybe a century or so) and the roses were gone, but the shields and the battle they represented remained. No longer being able to smell the roses, I looked at the shields, trying to remember the meaning in the

[oldname]

I don't think it is a language problem so much as it is a poor interface between two different 'operating systems' in the brain. One is relatively new and allows for reason, abstration, and the other various tools of our thought process which we use to justify our moral authority over the lesser creatures who are incapable of such feats (as far as we can tell). The other system is ancient and is based on instinctual drives which do not answer to our reasons, abstractions, and other various tools as fully as 'we' would like