[ExI] Optical illusion tricks you into seeing different colors

Fri May 21 04:44:08 UTC 2021

On Fri, 21 May 2021 at 09:09, Brent Allsop via extropy-chat <
extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote:

>
>
> On Wed, May 19, 2021 at 11:34 AM Stathis Papaioannou via extropy-chat <
> extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote:
>
>>
>>
>> On Thu, 20 May 2021 at 03:09, spike jones via extropy-chat <
>> extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote:
>>
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>> *…*> *On Behalf Of *Adrian Tymes via extropy-chat
>>>
>>> *Subject:* Re: [ExI] Optical illusion tricks you into seeing different
>>> colors
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>> On Wed, May 19, 2021 at 9:48 AM spike jones via extropy-chat <
>>> extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote:
>>>
>>> Wouldn’t it be cool to somehow create a device that could measure this?
>>> A color can’t really be doing the exact same thing in every brain, ja?
>>>
>>> >… unproductive discussions on the meaning of "qualia" (which is one of
>>> the reasons why I suggested ceasing use of that word)…
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>> The concept of qualia is tricky and always has been.  The terminology is
>>> going to be as tricky as the concept.
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>> Being an engineer and math guy, I like things that are stone cold
>>> objective.  I like it when steel and engineering meet to create a car that
>>> wins a race, which is why I like self-driving race cars even more: it takes
>>> the subjectiveness of the human brain out of the picture.  Cool!
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>> In order to give me some idea (after all this time) what is qualia (or
>>> what ARE qualia? (is one qualia a qualium?)) we need some kind of objective
>>> instrument or device which somehow measures what a brain is doing.
>>>
>> The singular of qualia is quale. Qualia are synonymous with experiences.
>> We can measure what a brain is doing when a human subject says “I see a red
>> strawberry” and we can measure what a self-driving car is doing when it
>> says “I see a red light” but we can’t know what they are experiencing. We
>> can guess that if the human subject’s brain processes are similar to our
>> own, their experiences are similar to our own,* but we can’t know. Even
>> if we could somehow connect our own brain to the human subject or the car,
>> altering our experiences, all we would know is what the melded being
>> experiences.*
>>
>>> --
>> Stathis Papaioannou
>>
>
>
> Spike, now that you understand, maybe you can help me with all this?  I
> can clearly see that other's of you understand.  I could use some help with
> Stathis.
>
> Stathis,
>
> After all my attempts, I'm still clearly failing to get you to understand
> how wrong and misleading this kind of faithless popular consensus bleating
> is.
>
> Even if I try again, will you continue to completely ignore all this, and
> instead of trying to understand it in a non qualia blind way, and just
> continue to make these kinds of bleating claims?
>
> As I've pointed out, so many times, there is the 1. Strong, 2. Stronger,
> and 3. Strongest methods of effing the ineffable, if achieved this will
> falsify your bleating claims that we can't eff the ineffable.
>
> The strong method is simply having a dictionary, based on non qualia blind
> observed facts, connecting the subjective to the objective in a way that
> can't be falsified.
> to understand this, see my simplified description of qualia to Spike, all
> using only mathematical lookup tables using the "=" sign.
> Sure, the fact that something like glutamate = redness (or something else)
> could be the only thing that has a redness quality isn't absolute truth,
> but if it can't be falsified, and if no functionalists can ever produce a
> redness, ever, it will be VERY trustworthy.
>
> Beyond that, let me go into more detail about the strongest method of
> effing the ineffable, which, if achieved, will results in absolute
> necessary truth.
>
> As Steven Lehar describes, we know that there is a "diorama" world in our
> head, rendered by our perception systems into consciousness, composed of a
> substrate of phenomenal intrinsic colors like redness and greenness.
>
> This Diorama is our knowledge of the world.  Half of this diorama is in
> our left hemisphere, and the other half, in the right hemisphere of our
> brain.
> The corpus callosum computationally binds all this stuff together into one
> composite qualitative experience, defined to be consciousness.
> The fact that this kind of effing communication happens between
> hemispheres, outright proves, all by itself, that your "even if we could
> somehow connect our own brain" to another is blatantly false.
> But then, you just continue to ignore such facts you don't like, and you
> continue to mistakenly assume I'm talking about "composite qualia" with:  "*all
> we would know is what the melded being experiences*" while I've
> attempted, many times, that I'm only talking about elemental qualia, out of
> which composite qualia or consciousness is composed.
>
> In other words, both our left, and our right hemisphere know, absolutely,
> what redness and greenness are like in our other hemisphere, since the
> corpus callosum binds all these intrinsic qualities together in both
> hemispheres so both hemispheres can be directly aware of all of them at the
> same time, in one unified conscious experience.
>

But the conscious experience of the two hemispheres is not necessarily the
same as the conscious experience of either hemisphere, either elemental or
composite. People with cochlear implants have auditory qualia, but that
doesn’t mean that they know what it is like to be a cochlear implant, which
is an electronic device, or that the cochlear implant knows what it is like
to be a human.

The prediction is, that when we come up with neural ponytails
> <https://youtu.be/X0mAKz7eLRc?t=146>, which do the same things the corpus
> callosum is doing, both of our worlds will be computationally bound
> together into one similarly singular conscious experiences, all of it being
> directly apprehended by all 4 hemispheres.  Our left hemisphere represents
> visual knowledge of our right field of vision, and the right hemisphere
> representing the left field of vision.   When computationally bound with a neural
> ponytails <https://youtu.be/X0mAKz7eLRc?t=146>, (even if only bound at
> the elemental level) we will have visual knowledge of what is behind us,
> bound to the knowledge of what is in front of us, resulting in a sphere of
> knowledge of everything around us, from the data being collected by  our
> partner's eyes, seeing behind our head.
>

Yes, and it would be a wonderful thing to experience, but we still won’t
know what it is like to be the other person.

And IF our partner is engineered to be red green inverted, strawberries in
> front of us will be represented with our redness, and the ones behind us
> will be represented with our greenness.
>

Maybe, or maybe we will see a new colour, or all red, or all green.

We will then know, necessarily since we will be directly apprehending both
> of these facts at the same time, that our parners redness is like our
> greenness, both of which we call red.
> If this is achieved, this will simply be necessarily true, as it is
> already necessarily true, between both of our hemispheres.
>

That may only work if the two connected entities are similar. See the above
example of a cochlear implant and a brain.

> My prediction for the future about how science historians will judge these
> kinds of claims of "functionalists" :
>
>  * "we can’t know. Even if we could somehow connect our own brain to the
> human subject or the car, altering our experiences, all we would know is
> what the melded being experiences "*
>
> These will be judged as clueless bleating of the popular masses.  These
> functionalists who, instead of trying to understand the above, they just
> continue to ignore it, believing that being qualia blind is OK, and that
> their so called "proof" justifies them continuing to make faithless claims
> like this that lead everyone astray into so called "hard problem" confusion.
>
> Stathis, I fully admit that this claim can be falsified in the future.  Do
> you have any similarly valuable falsifiable claims for the future you see,
> or at least something better than Chalmers' faithless claim that there will
> forever be "hard" (interpretation: impossible) problems with consciousness,
> or that your faithless claims of eternal ineffability, will always be true,
> prefunding to believe your qualia blind 'proof' is justified, despite the
> myriads of absurd conclusions that result, a few of which are described
> above, which I continue to attempt to point out?
>

You keep confusing the functionalist claim, that consciousness is multiply
realisable, with the "hard problem" claim. They are different.
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