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Comment by suddenlybananas | Hacker News Reader

I don't see how people being different from one another (uncontroversial, obvious basic fact) means that people have fundamentally different phenomenal experiences. You're conflating ability with experience when they are not the same thing.

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Do you know the anecdote about Feynman and John Tukey doing a mental counting task and the one being able to talk while he's doing it and the other not, and then the reveal is they are using a completely different mental representation:

https://calteches.library.caltech.edu/3591/1/Feynman.pdf

worth a read, to me it kinda indicates that different abilities can be enabled by differences in how to mentally represent something. but yeah its debatable how much of difference in ability comes from/with a difference in experience but I my gut feeling is a lot more than you'd think. feels really hard to prove it as we only know what it's like to be us.

But abilities (and inabilities) are intrinsically tied to phenomenal experiences. And you can even shape your experience by learning. It feels different to look at code, speak a language, play an instrument or do a kickflip when you’re an expert (or exceptionally (un-)talented). Some people are biologically or developmentally predisposed to different abilities, and if you talk to them enough, you’ll learn that the way they experience these abilities is different from yours. I am conflating it because this is conflated in reality. This should be obvious in hindsight - your brain doesn’t have separate ability and qualia compartments, you know.

Here's an easy test: If you imagine something, is it more or less vivid than your dreams?

Either way, you've established a difference in subjective phenomenology and there are people on either side of that divide.

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