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Q&A: The Philosophers’ Chestnut

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The Philosophers’ Chestnut

Question

With God's help,
Have a good week, and greetings to the Rabbi,
I wanted to ask the Rabbi: do we have any way to deal with the famous question that asks whether Reuven’s subjective experience is identical to Shimon’s?
As far as I know, the Rabbi often uses intuition to resolve questions of analogy, and I also saw that you used this to solve the famous question of the problem of other minds. But it doesn’t seem to me that this method helps in this case. Because although intuition can show that the psycho-physical structure (including consciousness) exists in both of them, it has no ability to experience how the other person experiences.
So I wanted to ask:
A. Does that nevertheless solve it? Or does the Rabbi have another idea for a solution?
B. Does this question have any practical significance at all? After all, in the end the main thing is that the experience does in fact describe reality itself in a coherent way, and so that should be enough for us. Just as there are many languages in the world, yet through all of them one can arrive at the same understanding of reality (not exact, but overall the analogy seems reasonable).

Answer

I do not know of a way to deal with this question. I also agree that intuition in this case is not really reliable.
But in truth I do not see any significant practical implications, since this concerns only our subjective perception of phenomena. As for their objective descriptions, we will agree. For example, it is not clear that what I see as the color yellow is also what you see, but both of us will agree on the wavelength of what we call the color yellow and on its physical properties.
 

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