Comment by kelseyfrog
3 years ago
I mean, what's it like to be you or me? How do we determine empathic distance and how is it related to phenomenological distance w.r.t. what-is-it-like-to-be-ness?
You can partially explore these spaces even within one's own mind, such as "what is it like to be me on DMT?" or "what is it like to be me in a week/month/year?"
We can even frame this as a Mary's Room[1] experiment in terms of, "Knowing everything there is to know about bats, would you learn anything new by being a bat?" If the answer is yes, then we can't, without being a bat, know everything there is to know about being a bat.
1. https://web.ics.purdue.edu/~drkelly/JacksonWhatMaryDidntKnow...
It seems to me like the answer to "would you learn anything new by being a bat?" is necessarily yes, because you would at least learn the answer to the question itself.