He seems to have caught the issue dead on, since you seem to be arguing you know more about pumping blood than the surgeons based on a feeling - exactly what the people arguing consciousness can't arise from biology are doing. They feel consciousness is some big important thing that can't be produced conventionally and then resort to the equivalent of religions to explain it - feelings arrived at with no scientific method that don't really hold any weight.
"you seem to be arguing you know more about pumping blood than the surgeons based on a feeling"
No, I did not argue that at all. I said that there are multiple types of knowledge regarding hearts. Surgeons know one type in depth. The subjective experience of a racing heart is different from physical knowledge about how the heart pumps, and even if you know in depth the chemical/physical reactions that lead to and accompany a pounding heart, you do not thereby know that subjective experience.
By your definition the subjective experience says nothing about how a heart actually works.
Except that not quite true, the subjective experience tells you there are pulses which increase in frequency under stress etc. Itβs just the surgeon understands what that means where subjective experience is less useful. Further, the subjective experience fails to separate the causes of a fast heart rate with the response of a fast heart rate.
This should suggest that the experience of consciousness is of minimal value when trying to understand it.
"By your definition the subjective experience says nothing about how a heart actually works."
No, that's a reductionist assumption. When I say "subjective experience" I am explicitly not indicating its quantifiable aspects. I am indicating what Nagel talks about in "What It Is Like to Be a Bat," the what-it-is-likeness, the phenomenological aspect. Not the increased pulse, not the hormones being released, not the neurons firing in the brain that correspond to a feeling of anger--the anger itself. An idealized observer enumerating all of anger's physical correlates does not give that observer the experience of that anger as it is felt by the person experiencing it. There is a difference between understanding something and living something.
