[ExI] Mental Phenomena

[Brent Allsop]

Hi Ben,
On Fri, Jan 10, 2020 at 3:50 AM Ben Zaiboc via extropy-chat <
extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote:

> Brent:
> I think I have a way to disprove your idea about physical substances in
> the brain producing qualia,


Wonderful!! Falsifying theories, forcing a scientific consensus, and
rigorously tracking this progress when people abandon falsified camps, is
what canonizer is all about.  And thanks for asking for clarification on my
poor English.


> Is your position that specific types of molecule in the brain (e.g. the
> infamous glutamate) are what produce specific qualia (e.g. the infamous
> 'red'), and that this mapping is one-to-one (eg. glutamate and only
> glutamate produces the 'red' quale and only that)?
>

Yes, but you are being qualia blind when you only say 'red', as I
understand 'red' as being anything that reflects or emits red light.  But
it sounds like you are instead talking about the very different physical
quality, redness.  My redness could be like your grenness, both of which we
label as red.

The only claim the consensus supporters of representational qualia are
making is that conscious information is represented by some type of qualia,
and that today, most everyone uses qualia blind (one word) models and
language.  The lack of consensus is just around the nature of qualia.  Some
predicting qualia are functional
<https://canonizer.com/topic/88-Qualia-Emerge-from-Function/18>, other
that qualia
are different than physics
<https://canonizer.com/topic/88-Substance-Dualism/48>, others that they are
down at the quantum level <https://canonizer.com/topic/88-Orch-OR/20>….   We
only use a simplified version of the easiest theory to falsify, "elemental
qualia are molecular material qualities
<https://canonizer.com/topic/88-Molecular-Materialism/36>," is to better
help people understand what it means to be qualia blind.  Once people
understand how not to be qualia blind with the simplest theory, and they
can easily falsify (or verify) that glutamate = redness, they can then do
the same for all other more capable theories.  Not being qualia blind is
what is required before experimentalists can start to falsify all these
competing theories predicting the nature of qualia.  Any theory is
justified for being used as a working hypothesis, till it is falsified.  So
we need to close this last remaining gap full of crap by falsifying all the
crap.

The consequence of this would be that if you removed glutamate from
> someone's brain (without killing them somehow), that person would be
> incapable of experiencing 'red'.
>

Exactly, this is how you falsify the prediction that redness = glutamate.
This kind of falsifiability is the whole point.  If this is achieved, you
just select another theory that has not yet been falsified as your new
working hypothesis.  You then do a global replace of the word 'glutamate'
in everything I have been saying, with another "working hypothesis of what
is redness, until you have found the necessary and sufficient set of stuff
that has a redness quality.  Then we will have eliminated all the crap,
knowing which theory is THE ONE, and only then we will finally know what
color things are.


Brent
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