Eric Schwitzgebel
speaker
445 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Jun 2011
last heard Jun 2011
Eric Schwitzgebel’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
What's closer to us, right, than our own experience?
How could we go wrong about that?
I mean, I think that intuition we have, and that's kind of core to the Cartesian project, right?
Descartes thought, you can't doubt this, right?
This is secure, right?
This meaning, of course, my own stream of experience right now, right?
So you'd think it would be easy to get it right about that.
And so I think people have been misled.
Their epistemic intuitions about the difficulty of introspection are out of tune with reality.
It's actually very difficult to get right about that stuff.
And so people leap in and very quickly they'll throw a questionnaire to subjects and then just trust the subject's reports.
The subjects haven't been trained.
And then what they get is garbage because the subjects really don't know very much about their imagery experience.
So I think we need to back away and be careful and fully appreciate how difficult
is to get it right about your experience.
And once we've done that and we look for the right kinds of training methods, the right kinds of corroboration of introspective report against other sorts of evidence like cognitive behavioral evidence or neuroscientific evidence, if we
are sufficiently careful about that, then I think we can make some progress, although I also think it's an open question how much progress we'll make.
Right.
So my
My main argument, I guess it comes together most in Chapter 7 of the book, is that if you look at a variety of cases, it doesn't seem like we have good knowledge of our stream of experience.
Showing 281–300 of 445 · page 15 of 23
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