[ExI] Mental Phenomena

[Brent Allsop]

Ben, this is all classic qualia blindness



Sure, everything you say is true, within a naive model of reality,
perception and epistemology of color.  Within your overly simplistic model,
the closest thing you can give to a physical definition of “red”  is to a
particular wavelength of light.  But that can't account for the inverted
color perception facts portrayed in this video
<https://canonizer.com/videos/consciousness/>.



All the 40 and growing number of experts that are supporting  (have signed)
“Representational Qualia Theory
<https://canonizer.com/videos/consciousness/>” are pointing out is that
everything in physics, today, including all peer reviewed journals on
perception of color are, like you are here, ‘qualia blind’.  Everyone
thinks there is a ‘hard mind body problem’ but there isn’t a hard mind body
problem.  The only problem is, people are thinking in a qualia blind way as
you are doing here.



You must distinguish between reality and knowledge of reality.  You must
have two labels for physical red.  Red as a label for anything that
reflects or emits red light, and redness as the physical quality of your
knowledge of ‘red’ things.  Physics must have both color and colorness
properties.  For example, the color of glutamate is white, because it
reflects white like.  It’s colorness property is redness (hypothetically).
Glutamate and our description of how it behaves in a synapse being a
description of what we directly experience as redness.



You must be able to say effing of the ineffable, bridging the explanatory
gap things like: My redness is like your greenness, both of which we call
red.



Otherwise you can’t tell anyone the qualitative color of anything, and
everyone that thinks this way must think there is a ‘hard mind body
problem.” Or an explanatory gap, that can’t be solved.



On Fri, Jan 10, 2020 at 2:43 AM Ben Zaiboc via extropy-chat <
extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote:

> Brent Allsop <brent.allsop at gmail.com> <brent.allsop at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> >If you surgically remove your eyes, and are put into a room with no
> light, then stimulate the optic nerve, identical to the way it would be
> when looking at a strawberry.   You would have identical knowledge of the
> strawberry.  What is that knowledge, and what is it that has the redness
> quality you experience?  This can’t be ‘perception’ as that requires eyes.
> It is simply conscious knowledge, the result of perception.
>
>
> You are making a meaningless distinction. I would see a strawberry
> (there's no need to say "have knowledge of", that's just an unnecessarily
> complicated way of saying the same thing).
>
> My eyes would be whatever provides the pattern of signals to my brain,
> instead of my original biological eyes. Even if that was a stored pattern
> in a computer, the pattern would be my eyes. Rather limited eyes, but by
> definition, whatever provides sensory signals to my visual cortex (or optic
> nerves, or any point along that pathway) is my eyes.
>
> "What is that knowledge", I can only interpret as "what do you see?", so
> the answer is "A strawberry". "What is it that has the redness quality?" =
> "What is  red?". Um, The strawberry!
>
> And if you're going to say "but the strawberry doesn't exist!", all I can
> say is yes, it does, in two different ways. A 'real' strawberry must have
> been used to create the stored pattern (or perhaps a composite of several
> strawberries), and a representation of a strawberry exists in my brain,
> exactly the same as when I used to see strawberries with my biological
> eyes.
>
> In the virtual reality that my brain creates all the time, it's this
> representation that's the important thing. In a sense, this is more 'real'
> than the physical object that presumably exists, or has existed, in the
> outside world. We can, after all, perceive and act upon things that have no
> existence in the outside world. Beauty, for example, or jealousy. Or the
> ghost I saw in the middle of my bedroom the other night (which turned out
> to be the silhouette of my cats head about two inches from my face).
>
> What constitutes the representation of a strawberry in my brain? Exactly
> the same pattern of neural activity as before, when I looked at a
> strawberry with my biological eyes.
>
> Perception does not require eyes, or any other *specific* sensory organ
> (I'm sure you're not claiming that I don't perceive music because my eyes
> are not involved, or that there's no such thing as the perception of cool
> wet grass because it involves several different sensory channels).
> Perception requires a *brain*. The sensory organs just provide input to
> the sensory processes.
>
> --
> Ben Zaiboc
>
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