[ExI] Mental Phenomena

[Brent Allsop]

Hi Ben,


You asked:



“Now why on earth would the experience of redness suddenly become the
experience of greenness? *How* could it?”



By simply inverting the red green signal anywhere in the causal chain of
events that is perception as proven can be done here
<https://canonizer.com/videos/consciousness/> (skip to the “Inverted
Perception” part).



It remains a fact that you could engineer (using just such inversions both
upstream and downstream from physical knowledge) one robot to represent red
knowledge with your redness, and another robot to represent red with your
greenness.  See “Inverted Qualia
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inverted_spectrum>”)  They could both pick
strawberries equally well.


You seem to be admitting that you only use one word for all things “red”.
That is the definition of “Qualia Blindness”.  In that world there is
an “explanatory
gap <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Explanatory_gap>” because you need at
least two words (red and redness) to model simple effing of the ineffable
ideas like: “My redness is like your greenness, both of which we call
red.”  As long as we remain qualia blind, nobody can know the true physical
color of anything.


It's not a "hard mind body problem" it's just a color problem.






On Mon, Feb 3, 2020 at 9:50 AM Ben Zaiboc via extropy-chat <
extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote:

> On 03/02/2020 14:28, Brent Allsop wrote:
>
> Hi Ben,
>
>
> “I expect it will be a description that isn't all that easy to decipher,
> as well. It will necessarily relate to a large number of processes, and
> will be different (possibly wildly different) in different brains, and
> likely restricted to a single point in time.”
>
>
>
> We are talking about completely different things.
>
>
> No, we're not.
>
> You are talking about information abstracted away from different qualities
> as they change over time and between people.  I’m talking about the
> quality (process) that is changing.
>
>
> Although you are muddying things terribly, by using the word 'qualities'.
> I'm talking about the patterns of information in the brain that arise when
> our senses send information into the brain. You just said you're talking
> about the same thing, except you use the word 'quality' instead of
> 'process'.
>
> I’m asking, what is the color of this process, before it changed, and how
> did this process change?
>
>
> What does that even mean?? A process doesn't have a colour! No more than
> knowledge does.
>
> I don't know how to say it any more simply: The sensation of experiencing
> a colour is a pattern of information-processing in the brain. That's it.
> It's not 'about' something else, it doesn't have a 'quality', it's not
> 'abstracted away' from anything, it just is.
>
> There is a necessary functional cost to achieve this substrate
> independence.  If P1 is the process before the change, and P2 is the
> objectively observable different process after the change,
>
> What change are you talking about here?
>
> you need two different dictionaries to get the same abstract information
> from the different processes before and after the change.
>
> There is no need to get any abstract information. The processes *are* the
> experiences of colour.
>
> Colors are just colors.  Sure, a redness processes can change from
> redness to greenness,
>
>
> Colours are indeed just colours. Now why on earth would the experience of
> redness suddenly become the experience of greenness? *How* could it? The
> only reason the experience is an experience of redness is because of the
> similarity it has to prior red things experienced. A redness experience
> could be succeeded by a greenness one,  though, and this happens all the
> time. Look from the strawberry to a leaf. But no-one is going to look at a
> strawberry and suddenly see a green thing (unless they have brain damage,
> or are colour-blind, in which case the leaves and the fruit are all the
> same colour).
>
> and we can have different dictionaries to get the same 'red' information.
>
>
>
> No, there are no dictionaries. There is no 'red information'. There are
> patterns of information, and associations with very many other patterns,
> shifting all the time. The pattern that today in Bob means 'I see a red
> strawberry', could well be different tomorrow, and is likely to be very
> different in Bill, but they all mean the same thing. The closest thing to a
> dictionary that could be said to exist is the memories of similar things
> seen in the past, in a particular individual (IOW, examples). Memories
> that, even if very similar in content, are probably encoded in different
> patterns in different people, and changed in the same person when they
> access them (I assume you're familiar with the idea that we change our
> memories every time we remember them. Or at least we re-write them, and
> they can easily change during this process).
>
> The dictionary before the change defines the redness process to be red,
> and after the change, the dictionary defines greenness to be red.  A
> redness quality just is, if it changes, it is an objectively observable and
> subjectively experienceable different process, there are no dictionaries
> required.
>
>
> The only thing that defines redness is the prior examples we have
> experienced.
> And there's that word again. There is no such thing as a 'redness
> quality'. There are information processes that cause people to say "That
> thing there is red". We can't say much more than that. One day we may be
> able to, but not today.
>
> --
> Ben Zaiboc
>
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> extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org
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>
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