[ExI] Why stop at glutamate?

Giovanni Santostasi gsantostasi at gmail.com
Mon Apr 10 01:11:11 UTC 2023


Actually with   "direct perception" I was trying to accommodate what I
think is your way of thinking. With this term I try to differentiate seeing
the color red from remembering the color red for example. I'm trying to say
that in both cases is still a bunch of activation patterns.

*That is, if people would start observing the brain in non quality blind
ways*
I don't know what this means.

*For example, you can't use the term "redness" (the way you do) without
specifying who's redness. *Yeah, of course and this actually undermines
your point. There is not such a thing as universal redness. At most we can
expose people to the color red and see there are similar but not IDENTICAL
patterns of activation in the brain. It is something that can be measured,
the neurons that are activated, the regions in the brain, the timing of
activations. I'm very good a data visualization and if I had to show how
this would look like after testing many people it would look like a heat
map representing the areas of the brain that are activated by a given
number of individuals. There will be red areas representing 90 % shared
area of the brain that activates when these individuals are exposed to the
color red. The beauty of this is that I can train then a NN to associate
this activation pattern with a person seeing red. Then I can show a person
the color red and if this and other areas with another given activation
probability are activated then the NN can say "RED" meaning the person is
seeing red.
This is not just what the best can do but what science is all about. You
can actually go a step further and if you had the technology then activate
the region of the brain associated with Red and produce the experience of
red in the person even if no red was actually perceived! What else do you
want in a good redness science?
I do not get it.
It has not be done with red yet but it is being done with memories of a
labyrinth layout as I already explained. Why color would be different?










On Sun, Apr 9, 2023 at 5:59 PM Brent Allsop <brent.allsop at gmail.com> wrote:

>
>
> On Sun, Apr 9, 2023 at 4:32 PM Giovanni Santostasi <gsantostasi at gmail.com>
> wrote:
>
>> So maybe we can read a bunch of papers and come back. Let's try to
>> understand what is difference between direct perception and memory. This
>> should clarify a lot of the stuff we are talking about. I'm not an expert
>> in this field so I need to catch up.
>>
>
> The term "direct perception" is a logical contradiction to me.  Perception
> is a chain of causal events that results in a conscious experience.  You
> don't "perceive" that experience.  It is the subjective final result of
> perception.  It is simply a quality of a single pixel of your visual
> knowledge.
>
> I bet you can't find any paper, anywhere, that is not completely quality
> blind.  If you find one, I would like to read it.  For example, you can't
> use the term "redness" (the way you do) without specifying who's redness.
> Since one person's redness could be engineered (or due to genetic
> randomness or lots of other development possibilities, like different
> language) to be like someone elses greenness.  In every case, the color
> terminology will always be mapped, or false colored back to wavelengths of
> light.  And THAT false coloration is the problem.
>
>
>> But, after a few seconds of research online, lol, an interesting paper.
>> It seems they are claiming that perception is actually affected by
>> language, early experiences in childhood and many other stuff that you will
>> not think to affect something so direct as seeing a damn color. As I
>> claimed before there is nothing "direct" in that experience, the entire
>> idea of qualia is garbage. The red we experience is simply a complex
>> message from the brain to the brain that a particular type of stimuli is
>> happening. But this message is the output of a very complex chain of events
>> that is affected by many things that happened in the brain like exposure to
>> certain experiences and so on. This makes sense because our sensory
>> experience can be refined for example.
>> You can train to see colors better or distinguish between different
>> shades. There are studies showing that people in different cultures
>> perceive colors differently and have words to distinguish colors that in
>> other cultures are considered the same.
>> Again, it is not glutamate or anything physical that makes the color red
>> but a given neural pattern (that of course is also a physical thing because
>> it is associated with particular neurons but it doesn't matter if it is
>> neurons or weights in a neural network equivalent).
>> The logical conclusion is that if the patterns is what matters then
>> weights in ANN or neuron connections in the brain are completely
>> interchangeable. So software can be aware, Gordon and Brent. Yes, it can.
>>
>
> Let me see if I have this right.  You believe a subjective redness
> experience is the way we are subjectively aware of a particular neural
> pattern, including self referential recursion.  I can agree that this is a
> hypothetical possibility which science could verify.  That is, if people
> would start observing the brain in non quality blind ways.  You clearly
> know far more about neural science than I do, and so I'm now very seriously
> doubting my belief that it is redness that is behaving the way it does,
> because of its redness quality.  There could very well be a recursive
> neural pattern that makes up a single pixel of redness conscious knowledge.
>
>
>
>
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