...if I understand you correctly, I must say the objective aspect is controlling the subjective aspect. I mean, if my brain is identical to that of another person, she's gonna feel pain identical to me, because our systems function the same.
Yes, yes, yes!
But I don't think it's quite right to say that the objective aspect controls the subjective aspect. That two identical brains must have two identical minds as their subjective aspects seems to be no more and no less justified a claim than that two identical minds must have two identical brains as their objective aspects. It seems to me that the chief merit of dual-aspect theories is that they save you from having to commit to one claim over the other. It enables you to plot a course between the Scylla of idealism and the Charybdis of materialism.
Now, some humans can't feel pain for instance, but they can still feel stressed if being tortured. So there's a good chance they'll suffer emotionally even if their brain can't register pain. Which is still a type of suffering I'd say it's not ok to do to another person (or most other animals).
But still, in the case of mammals, we can make a probable estimate of how and if animals suffer based on their anatomy and seeing how they respond in real time. If animals lack those centers in the brain that humans lack when they don't register pain, we can infer the animals are suffering mainly due to emotional stress and not physiological pain, so to speak. Now, if that was actually the case, correct me if I'm wrong, but I do believe we'd be aware of these mechanisms in animals (or lack of). Most probably.
Suffering is bad; the suffering of animals is bad. And animals
do suffer. On this much we agree. I'm just trying to figure out what suffering
is to see if minimizing it is a feasible goal. I'm leery of anatomical definitions of it because they restrict it to the particular bodies treated by anatomy, discounting the possibility that it may be a much more general phenomenon.
The brains of humans and animals are objects among many other objects in nature. So why should human and animal minds be all alone?
If you could achieve a God-like vantage from which you could see perfectly how my body functioned and how it was affected by my environment, my actions would
seem to you to follow from causes as distinct and inexorable as the impacts between resin balls on a billiards table seem to me. And yet, I would still
feel my actions as acts of will. The only possible explanation for this, unless I've missed something, is that
seeing and
feeling, or
perception and
appetition, to borrow terminology from Leibniz, are two complimentary ways of knowing the same thing: causality. You can watch billiard ball collisions and take notes on their symmetries all day, but you will never
see any causes, just a series of contingent events,
effects: this is the "problem of induction" identified by Hume. In the will, we
feel necessity, we know that we are ourselves a
cause or, perhaps more precisely, a
force, in that subjective
want/suffering and natural forces are two aspects of the same thing.
So I propose that we view ourselves as completing not just a physical, but also a mental continuum with nature. Just as we view the human mind as the subjective aspect of the human brain, so should we view other objects, whatsoever exerts a causal influence, as having a subjective aspect of its own. The alternative is to suppose, like Descartes, that subjectivity is inexplicably restricted to human (and, in our case, some animal) brains, which is a preposterous
petitio principii.
Heh, I didn't read the thread, but did you just deny that truth, invalidate it based on your own criteria, or invalidate what the other person finds valid about it?
To be more precise, I think Cartesian dualism is unfounded, rights are a fiction, and utilitarianism is inapplicable to reality.
And I'm not even sure whether that interpretation was the right one
