Are Mental States Measurable and Empathy with Technology (12th Oct)

Today we talked about whether mental states are measurable by physical facts or not. We Looked at a video of a woman, who factually knew everything about colour but had never experienced colour before. and whether by experiencing/viewing colour for the first time, she would know anything new about colour from the experience. Personnally I believe that the experience of witnessing that colour isn’t measurable/something that you can learn, so the woman would learn the experience of that colour and maybe even associate something with that colour now that she has seen it for the first time.

Personally like a lot of other people said in the seminar I believe that at this point in time that an experience can’t be measured and that even if two different people were sharing the same experience their mental states on that experience/there absorption of that experience would be different. e.g. Two peoples view/experience of love will be different even if they’re in the same relationship. Though saying this I don’t close my mind off to the possibility of the mental state being something that could be measurable in the future. As our knowledge as a human race is constantly expanding along with technology that helps us to accelerate our understanding of things. Overall believing it’s not that crazy of a concept that mental states and experiences could be something that’s measurable in the future, especially looking at past revelations of things we thought were impossible that are now common practice e.g. people being able to have nearly any question answered in seconds via our phones and things like Google.

Empathy and Technology:

We also looked at empathy and how as soon as an object or person shows human emotions we form attachments to that object . Especially if it looks/sounds in pain we feel sympathy even if its a inanimate object. I think this is a weird concept as it’s something that’s is done all the time especially looking at old kid films that I used to watch where a lot the time they would give objects their own personality which as a viewer you’d form genuine attachments. I also think its weird how the human brain sub-consciously does this.

The other element that we discussed that I found very interesting was the idea that when an object becomes too human e.g. Robotic AI, we don’t like this and find it creepy, due mostly I believe to the realness of this object.

#GAM701