I know what successful communication looks like.
What does successful representation look like?
Yes, it appears meaningless, I and others have tried hard to figure out a possible account of it.
I haven't tried to get a fully general account of communication but I'm aware there's been plenty of philosophical work, and I can see partial accounts that work well enough.
I'm communicating, which I don't have a fully general account of, but is something I can do and has relatively predictable effects on my experiences.
Not at all, to the extent head is a territory.
What does it mean for a model to "represent" a territory?
>On the other hand, when I observe that other nervous systems are similar to my own nervous system, I infer that other people have subjective experiences similar to mine.
That's just part of my model. To the extent that empathy of this nature is useful for predicting what other people will do, that's a useful thing to have in a model. But to then say "other people have subjective experiences somewhere 'out there' in external reality" seems meaningless - you're just asserting your model is "real", which is a category error in my view.
My own argument, see https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/zm3Wgqfyf6E4tTkcG/the-short-case-for-verificationism and the post it links back to.
It seems that if external reality is meaningless, then it's difficult to ground any form of morality that says actions are good or bad insofar as they have particular effects on external reality.
But, provided you speak about this notion, why would verificationismism lead to external world anti-realism?
Anti-realism is not quite correct here, it's more that claims about external reality are meaningless as opposed to false.
One could argue that synthetic statements aren't really about external reality: What we really mean is "If I were to check, my experiences would be as if there were a tree in what would seem to be my garden". Then our ordinary language wouldn't be meaningless. But this would be a highly revisionary proposal. We arguably don't mean to say something like the above. We plausibly simply mean to assert the existence of a real tree in a real garden.
I'm not making a claim about what people actually mean by the words they say. I'm saying that some interpretations of what people say happen to lack meaning. I agree that many people fervently believe in some form of external reality, I simply think that belief is meaningless, in the same way that a belief about where the electron "truly is" is meaningless.
Two Moderna doses here with no significant side effects