[ExI] Fwd: Paper on "Detecting Qualia" presentation at 2015 MTA conference

[Brent Allsop]

Hi John,



Thanks for bringing this up.  It is good to know that at least someone is
making a good effort to try to understand this stuff.



In my opinion, you are missing what it means to detect, and not abstracting
your model in a way to enable the understanding of detection of anything.



To illustrate, let’s talk about detecting the property of “causal red”,
which is defined to be the ability of something to reflect 650 NM light.  So
the question is, what does it mean to detect this, as apposed to detecting
a green leaf?



You could abstract this detection process in a way that says it was the
DNA, in the seed, that put all the sugars and everything together, in the
right way, and that in this way, it was DNA, that was the initial cause.  But
of course, with that improperly simplified model, you would not be
understanding how the detection of the casual red property, vs detecting
the green leaves, works.  And if you take this logic further, even the DNA
isn’t the initial cause…  You are just picking an arbitrary point in the
causal chain, when you pick 650 NM light like that, which has nothing to do
with what you are trying to “detect”.



Brent Allsop



On Tue, Jan 27, 2015 at 9:04 PM, John Clark <johnkclark at gmail.com> wrote:

> Brent, in your simplified hypothetical you say that in the perception
> process the
> neurotransmitter Glutamate behaves the way it does because of its REDNESS
> quality. But that can't be right, not even theoretically. There may be a
> long causal chain between the two but Glutamate would behave the way it
> does because of electromagnetic radiation with a wavelength of 650nm;
> that's what powered the molecule to do whatever its does not REDNESS.
>
>   John K Clark
>
>
>
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