[ExI] Mental Phenomena

Tue Jan 7 00:02:47 UTC 2020

Hi Ben,

*“The 'thing that is green', or the subjective experience of a specific
green object, is not something like a physical property of a chemical.”*

And

*“The phrase "what it is that has the redness quality you can 'directly
experience' betrays a dualistic mindset"*

There are some very smart “substance dualists
<https://canonizer.com/topic/88-Substance-Dualism/48>” pointing out that
this view hasn’t yet been falsified.  If we falsify that all known physics
aren’t responsible for the redness we experience, we must conclude that is
it some new physics, possibly something interfaced through to some neither
world of the dead?

There are a whole heap of “Property Dualists
<https://canonizer.com/topic/88-Property-Dualism/19>.”  In fact this is
still one of the leading consensus ladder of camps.  I was once a supporter
of this camp.  But now I’ve realized, along with multiple others, how
misleading even this view is and are now “monist
<https://canonizer.com/topic/88-Monism/65>s”.

There are two ways of knowing things.  First is objective perception of
color and such.  In this view there is the target of perception (like the
sugar content or ripeness of a strawberry) there is the very different
physics our senses detect as they represent that, and finally there is our
knowledge of such.  All of these obviously different physical things.

You don’t perceive colorness properties, you are directly aware of them, in
computationally bound register pixels of our conscious CPU.  These are the
final result of perception.

The first method is abstract (requires correct interpretation of whatever
physics is landing on our senses), and therefor can be mistaken.  As in the
case when something “seems” different than it really is.

Colorness is a physical property that just is and can’t be mistaken.  It is
the mistaken seeming knowledge that may be incorrectly representing its
referent.

It is a necessary truth, that if you consciously know something, there must
be something that is that knowledge, and it must be computationally bound
into your awareness.

We have knowledge of spirits, in our diorama of knowledge (represented as
if existing behind and looking out of our knowledge of our eyes.)  While
most of our visual knowledge has a referent in reality, our knowledge of
our spirit does not.

The funny thing about people that believe in Ghosts, is that even a ghost,
like a “homunculus in a cartesian theater.”  if they are “self-aware” there
necessarily must be some subset of that ghost that is its knowledge of
self.  Which of course is kind of absurd.

On Mon, Jan 6, 2020 at 7:00 AM Ben Zaiboc via extropy-chat <
extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote:

>
> On 06/01/2020 07:00, Brent Allsop <brent.allsop at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>
>  >When you experience a redness quality, when you are dreaming or not,
> there must be something, that is that redness quality you are
> experiencing.  My redness could be like your greenness,
>
>
> No, I very much doubt it. In order for your 'redness' to be like my
> 'greenness', it would have to be associated with the perception of
> grass, racing cars, limes, and hundreds of other things linked to the
> word 'green' in my mind. The 'something that I'm experiencing' (but see
> below) when I see a lime and am just concentrating on the colour, is far
> from a simple thing. And it's probably a different thing, to some
> degree, each time I do this.
>
> The 'thing that is green', or the subjective experience of a specific
> green object, is not somethihng like a physical property of a chemical.
> It's a large pattern of neural activation in my brain. This pattern is
> necessarily linked to other patterns that represent instances of green
> objects, among many other patterns.
>
> The phrase "what it is that has the redness quality you can directly
> experience" betrays a dualistic mind-set, I think. As though the 'me'
> that was experiencing the sight (or memory, etc.) of a red object, or
> just a flat field of the colour red, or even the abstract notion of
> 'redness', was a different thing to the actual experience. Which of
> course gives rise to all sorts of awkward and nonsensical questions.
>
> That's not what I think is happening. The way of looking at this that
> currently makes sense to me, is that when I'm in that state of
> 'experiencing a red thing', that is what I am. There are not two
> separate things, one having an experience, and the other being the
> experience. There is just one. There is a pattern of neural activation
> going on in a brain. At that moment, 'I' am not 'experiencing' that
> pattern, the pattern is what I am. The next moment, of course, the
> pattern (or rather, the complex set of all the patterns that are
> currently active) changes, and I am something else.
>
> This is why I say that "elemental redness" is a nonsense concept, and
> why I don't give any credence to the idea of a chemical substance
> somehow having a 'red property'. If that was the case, I would be that
> red property of that chemical. Which gives rise, again, to all sorts of
> nonsensical questions. Which molecule am I? How do I think of something
> other than red? and so on.
>
> --
> Ben Zaiboc
>
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