On 20 January 2015 at 05:42, meekerdb <meeke...@verizon.net> wrote: What would that mean? If neuroscientists of the future develop brain > monitoring instrumentation and software such that they scan watch processes > in your brain and then say correctly, "You were seeing red and it reminded > you of a dress your late grandmother wore and made you sad." would you > accept that as "entirely observable"?
Well, I would of course accept that what had been observed was entirely observable! It would mean that the public component of the public-private 'entanglement' - the pattern of neurological activity correlated with specific conscious states - had indeed been brought under observation. But I wouldn't thereby be forced to accept that the neuroscientists had direct access to my private state of mind in the same sense as I do myself. The relevant distinction is that between the result of observation, on the one hand, and the mode of observation, on the other. The latter entails two 'entangled' components, of which only one can be made 'public'. Despite its absence from the public sphere, the private part cannot in fact be disregarded in any consideration of 'observation' since it is an ineliminable component of the observers' own mode of observation! David -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Everything List" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
