I am suggesting that another person can be made to experience something very close to what you experience,
We already can. Writing, speaking, music, poetry, art, dance, coding, etc.
It makes perfect sense that as one could study shared experiences more and more, a more detailed understanding of psychology and experience would come to light. That is my point. You suggest that this knowledge could not develop at all?
No, I agree completely. I've thought about it since I was a little kid. Bring on the Neuro IPod. What I'm saying isn't possible to develop is awareness being generated mathematically. Not in another person's brain, but on it's own. Math alone can't ever come to life.
As to your comment on internal reflection: Internal reflection within the same brain is not hard to understand. It's self-reflection. For instance, in a dream, your brain triggers images to appear on your optic regions, which are then interpreted by other parts of your brain, which trigger other memories, emotions and associations ... which cause images to appear on your optic regions... etc.
You're using 'self', 'you', and 'your' to try to disprove that there is a such thing as a self, you, or your anything. How do these billions of discrete cells translate automatic chemical processes a coherent internal experience of fantastic depth and aesthetic richness which perceives itself as a living entity of freewill and voluntary control?
Think of the internet with no users. No screen, no mouse, no keyboard. The computers are still humming along, but the internet does the internet really exist? It may as well just be wires plugged into plastic doing nothing. It has no function. The whole internet is just a medium for human consciousness to interact with itself. The brain is the same thing. Just as the internet shapes the qualities of the communication going through it, the human form, including the brain, shapes the qualities of the awareness present in it.
The "hard" problem is only "hard" because right now we have no way to peer in and experience those things in other people, and to analyze those experiences.
Being able to NeuroSCSI into another person's brain doesn't make the hard problem any less hard. We still don't know why we feel like a 'who' in a life of 'why' rather than a process of 'what' in a universe of 'how'. The essential mystery of consciousness is not affected at all by the degree of our ability to share it.
If a way were to be found to peer in and examine it more directly, by definition it would not be that hard. Are you saying that just because it is said that they are "hard" now, these problems are forever hard? Are you saying that something hard cannot be more soluble, or perhaps later, with better observation and replication, be found to be made of of easier, more digestible bits of knowledge? Is that your suggestion?
It's only hard if you insist that the answers to your question take a certain form. The answer to who you are and why your life is the way it is are very straightforward when approached with common sense. We feel things because that's what life is. That's how the cosmos works. It becomes hard only when you try to force an interior, essential reality into an existential, exterior theory. It doesn't work. There's no number that equals the feeling of pain, yet most any living creature knows what pain is.
What are blueberry pancakes? Their smell (olfactory), their texture while chewing (haptic, motor, time-based factors), the feeling of being awake in the morning (wakefulness, hormonal state), the clank of silverware on plates (audio), your heart rate at the time (and other homeostatic functions), emotional state at the time, your sense of hunger (digestive) ... and whatever other body functions, nervous states and experiences were memorized when you had blueberry pancakes.
Those are analytical deconstructions and associations with the concept of blueberry pancakes. Another way to look at blueberry pancakes is that it's an English language phrase which evokes a gestalt constellation of iconic identity. A five year old can appreciate blueberry pancakes without any scientific knowledge at all. Pancakes aren't just a somatic procedure, they are a human experience. You can build an aluminum dinosaur with customized actuators and sensors to simulate olfactory detection, mechanical chewing, hunger-like algorithms...you can program the thing to say 'Yum, pancakes goood', but the dinosaur isn't experiencing anything, let alone pancakes.
Do you disagree that the data and interconnections for memory and experience are stored in your brain and nervous system? If they are not, where do you suggest they are stored?
No, I agree. I think that the brain is the local container for data and interconnections for memory and experience - but it's the inside of the brain, not the exterior behavior of cells that is what we perceive. Not the semiconductors and hard disk sectors - they organize our access to memory and experience, but they are not the same thing as consciousness.
That's all that your blueberry pancake memories are, that is all that the mind of the person behind Immediocracy is:
data stored in an electrochemical format in a brain.
Of course. By the same token, all that electrochemical brain formats are is experiences and memories made physical. Every peptide and ganglion carrying the sights and sounds of a lifetime, from all it's sublime spectacles to it's mortal brutality...all right there inside and between nests of organic molecules.
I think that both the hard and easy qualia are enormously difficult to deeply understand, but I do not think it is impossible to do so.
Qualia is easy to understand. Water is wet. Beauty is beautiful. What I think is impossible is expressing qualia quantitatively independent of living consciousness.
