[ExI] Mental Phenomena

Adrian Tymes atymes at gmail.com
Thu Jan 9 04:58:08 UTC 2020


On Wed, Jan 8, 2020 at 8:39 PM Brent Allsop <brent.allsop at gmail.com> wrote:

> In other words, any brain could arbitrarily use different sets of physics,
> like your greenness, to represent red with.
>

Again, it isn't physics, it's biology - the specific patterns that have
been associated with the colors.  This is no more physics than designing
CPUs is physics: to state it in terms of physics without so much as
acknowledging the topology is, at best, extremely misleading.

In physics terms, you are discarding necessary detail to understand and
model the system, and then - predictably - coming up with bizarre maps that
fail to correspond to reality.

By analogy, consider the inherent physics of the US/Mexico border.  Try to
describe any distinct physical properties that make a physical object - a
piece of rock, say - part of that border or not part of that border.  If
you're ignoring the location, you can't find any such property.

Likewise, what are the physics of a NOT gate in silicon?  What gives each
molecule of that its NOTness?  Ain't no such thing, if you're ignoring the
overall pattern.

Same thing here.  It is the pattern of neurons and their attached memories
that give something its redness.


> It is a hypothetical possibility that our descriptions of the causal
> properties of glutamate, as it reacts in a synapse, are the same physical
> properties we directly experience as redness
>

In other words, that statement is false.  There is no such hypothetical
possibility for an anonymous synapse, as opposed to very specific synapses
that are associated with the recall of things that are red.
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