[ExI] utah: RE: Frank Jackson's brilliant color scientist Mary

[Brent Allsop]

Hi Bill,

On Thu, Dec 26, 2019 at 10:30 AM William Flynn Wallace via extropy-chat <
extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote:

> I think it's only circular if there is only one example.  bill w
>

What do you mean by "Only one example"?



All information we have, all informant in all computers today, and all
information we get through our senses is abstract information.  Anything
can represent it, but only if you have an interpretation mechanism to know
what it means.  Everything in the perception process is abstract.  Thit is,
up until the brain makes its final qualitative interpretation: “Do I
represent this pixel of conscious information with physical redness or
physical greenness?”  What our brain chooses to represent conscious
information with is what makes consciousness substrate dependent.  Sure, a
red/green qualia invert can function indistinguishably from another, but
subjectively one is physically different than the other.



And as I keep saying: There is no “Hard Mind Body Problem”, it’s just a
color problem.  All physicists and neuroscientists of perception, and all
the information they provide to us are “qualia blind”.  It is all no
different than everything Frank Jackson's Mary knows.    Of all the things
experimentalists observe and describe, they never can tell us which of
those is a description of redness, and how this differs from greenness.


And again: You don't perceive colorness, colorness is the final physical
result of conscious perception.  It is the physical quality of the physics
our brain decides to represent conscious information with.  We are
directly aware
of it.  Perception can be mistaken, and requires qualitative
interpretation.  Physical redness just is the quality of some set of
physics.


You need to define a word like red.  And physical redness is that
definition.






>
> On Thu, Dec 26, 2019 at 10:43 AM John Clark via extropy-chat <
> extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote:
>
>> On Mon, Dec 23, 2019 at 4:29 PM Brent Allsop via extropy-chat <
>> extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote:
>>
>> > *In other words, both (255, 0, 0) and "red" are not physically red.
>>> You need to point to something and say: "THAT is red" to provide a physical
>>> definition to those abstract terms. *
>>>
>>
>> If you're interested in subjectivity, or in gaining understanding of the
>> most basic fundamental nature of anything, not just consciousness, you've
>> got to forget about definitions because ultimately that always leads to
>> circularity, instead you've got to use examples. You point to a ripe tomato
>> and say "That is  (255, 0, 0), aka pure red". If I were to make a change in
>> that convention so that now the color of a ripe tomato was (0, 0, 255) then
>> your objective behavior would not change and subjectively you could not
>> even tell that a change had been made. So if objectively the inversion is
>> not important and subjectively it's nor important either then the inversion
>> was just not important.
>>
>> John K Clark
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>>
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