[ExI] Who does or does not think consciousness is composed of color (and other) qualities?

[Giovanni Santostasi]

Brent,
Most of us are technical and science people. We really do not talk the same
language you do. I don't know if this is philosophical language or not but
it is not how a scientist would talk about this stuff. I gave you examples
of how a scientist thinks about these issues.
Let me repeat this again in a different way. There is no mystery about what
the red color is because we know it is a particular frequency region of
vibration of the EM spectrum. The redness (using your language) you refer
to is the experience of red in the brain is a complex phenomenon that
involves many physical and chemical reactions and activations patterns in
the brain. In another post, I gave you an example on how we could explore
this topic (and probably it is already done) which is to expose 1000s of
people (often is much fewer in these experiments) to red and gree objects
and see what activation patterns you obtain. Then you overlap the brain
regions of several people and see what they have in common.
You can create a phase diagram with these activation patterns (fMRI
intensity in a given region vs another) and color code the 2 conditions
(red or blue on stimuli). You will get a similar pattern for most people
but not identical. The green stimuli would be distinguishable from the red
ones because of the different regions involved. In fact, this could be used
in reverse to guess what color somebody is seeing by looking at the
particular individual dot on the phase diagram.
You used a sample to train the AI to make the association between phase
diagram coordinates and color stimuli and then test with an independent
sample to see if the AI get it right.
This is how you do science about these topics, this is how you think
scientifically on these topics.
This is the language a scientific person would want to use to discuss these
topics.
You can ask an infinite number of questions and go deeper and deeper in
understanding what redness means doing this. It leads somewhere.
Your language and way of thinking is what the ancient philosophers were
doing and this why they were writing on papyrus and we use computers. Their
approach led to almost nothing in terms of understanding of the physical
world until the scientific revolution happened and we did more progress in
the last few hundred years than the 1000s before.
Giovanni







On Sun, Apr 9, 2023 at 7:28 PM Brent Allsop via extropy-chat <
extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote:

> Thanks mike.  It is good to know.
>
> Would you agree that redness is not a quality of the strawberry, but a
> quality of our conscious knowledge of the strawberry, and that all we know
> of the color qualities of things is the color qualities things seem to be?
>
>
>
> On Sun, Apr 9, 2023 at 8:13 PM Mike Dougherty via extropy-chat <
> extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote:
>
>> On Sun, Apr 9, 2023, 9:36 PM Brent Allsop via extropy-chat <
>> extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote:
>>
>>>
>>> I'd like to take a survey, and find out if anyone does or does not agree
>>> with this statement:
>>>
>>>
>>> Consciousness is composed of qualities like redness, greenness, and
>>> warmth.
>>>
>>
>> I have difficulty understanding what you are even asking.  Every attempt
>> you have ever made to clarify your position has made less sense.  I get
>> frustrated that we exchange so many words for so little
>> recognition/understanding then give up.
>>
>> I do not agree with that statement but I expect you will ask me why and
>> direct me to open or support a camp to prove my thinking is reasonable by
>> consensus.. I am not going to do that.
>>
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