very draft sketch #tbc

notes on nagel’s martian

inferring content and characteristic of subjective experience, by observing common activities

  • Consider human ritual (or spectacle) of eating
    • All of the circumstances, situations, occasions
      • Material substantive difference in
        • Types of food
          • Chemical composition
          • Source
          • Nature
        • Presentation
          • Consumption
          • Packaging
          • Distribution
        • Value proposition
          • Nutrition
          • Volume
            • Portion sizes
          • Pleasure
          • Side effects
          • Status
            • Individual wealth
            • Society of it
    • The amount of our day spent
      • Enacting
      • Preparing
        • Acute, local
        • Work, the future
    • The range of experiences
      • Body state
        • Hunger
        • Satiation
      • Eating
        • Flavours
        • Sensations

I really want to emphasise the dynamic ranges here.

  • Why?

    • We like it?
    • Think of the extent to which our lives, and civilisation is built around it
    • The answer is fundamental
    • We must eat to survive,
      • Because we need replacement parts for homeostasis
      • Cannot generate on the fly
      • So we must source by any means
      • We have evolved to act as if we knew the importance of locating, acquiring, consuming, preparing those spare parts
      • But if we didn’t know, how?
      • Embodied mechanics, later, cognitive mechanics
      • The range of our experience matches the range of circumstances our survival benefits from distinguishing, though, bandwidth is finite
        • So likely grain rather than
        • Expand upon #tbc
      • But all of that, is special case to the general case
      • We eat because
        • Conservation of energy
        • Composition
        • Construction sequence
      • Fundamentals of universe, constraints of our implementation, also constrain ancestral composition
        • Inherited
        • Propagate
    • Expand upon #tbc

  • What else is like this?

    • What goes up comes down
    • What goes in comes out

  • Are the circumstances, situations and occasions the same?

    • No
    • Still dynamic range, but orders of magnitude less
    • Expand upon #tbc

  • As far as range goes (but little else), altogether more bland

    • To the same extent, we don’t
      • Care for it
      • Share it
      • Make the same occasion of it
      • Document it, whether archive, or real time
      • Decorate or accessorise it
      • Align it with status or society

  • Fundamentally more homogeneous across the species

    • Expand upon #tbc
    • Young, elderly, and maybe rich get fed
    • Young, elderly and perhaps fewer rich get cleaned up

  • The martian

    • Knows that/why we eat and evacuate
    • Observes all of the above
    • Sees the difference in dynamic range, the space-of-all between both

  • Can infer much about our shared subjective experience

  • Hunger