From PhilPapers forum Philosophy of Mind:

2017-01-12
RoboMary in free fall
Hi Jo, 
Well I mentioned the assumption I was making:

There is no assumption of niave realism, just an assumption that you were thinking that corresponding to the objects you consciously experience were objects that could be reduced to dynamic relations of forces. And just to make the equation I supplied clear, they are just to indicate that the firings of the neuronal subject would not provide evidence of the system arrangement it was embedded in, or how many "objects" the system was receiving inputs from. 

Are you suggesting your theory about the subject experiencing what you are experiencing being a neuron in a human brain makes no assumption that corresponding to the objects that you experience are objects that could be reduced to dynamic relations of forces?  So for example, were you not assuming that corresponding to your experience of using a computer to communicate with me, there existed a computer (that is reducible to dynamic relations of forces), or that if you were to experience brain surgery that there was a human with a brain that contained neurons? If you are claiming that you did not make any such assumption, then could you explain what you were basing the existence of neurons on?

Also I mentioned:

Furthermore consider a neuron subject which receives a certain group of firings, which is experienced as experience A, what difference would it make in your story if it had been experienced as experience B? For example consider what you are experiencing now to be experience A, but supposing those same firings had instead been an experience involving no thoughts but just reflecting the dynamic relations occurring in the neuron, for example some visual imagery the neuron. How do you explain knowing and the human being able to report which of those two possibilities you were experiencing? You had mentioned that what you were experiencing was evidence, but I was not clear whether you were considering it to be evidence that you could react to.
You did not seem to answer, unless you were claiming that the context the word "knowing" was used here indicates it to be a pseudo concept. If so I do not see how it can be, but let me rephrase, how can you tell which of those scenarios is the reality of the situation (that you are having experience A or that you are experiencing experience B), or are you claiming you cannot?

Yours sincerely, 

Glenn