[ExI] Why stop at glutamate?

[Brent Allsop]

Hi Giovanni,
Yes, that is all what I've been trying to describe, I just don't have
enough neuroscience to be at your level.  You are finally thinking in a way
that is not quality blind, so thank you.
And this proposed testing would work great, IF it is indeed some location
in the brain, or a particular neural path that is responsible for redness,
but it will likely miss if redness is something material, like glutamate,
or something at the quantum level.
But your proposal to stimulate things (i.e. stimulate, then say that is
Giovanni's redness, to which the subject could say: Oh, that is my
greenness.) is definitely important.
Also, there could be issues with having an entire region of redness.  With
that you could get some higher level model that isn't directly
correlated with the redness or greenness of individual pixels.
That is why I like switching one pixel in the field of vision from redness
to greenness.  Then find the minimum, whatever it is, that is
responsible for just the one pixel going from redness to greenness.
And of course, another critical part of all this is the computational
binding of all these pixels of color qualities into composite consciousness
visual knowledge.  In Computers, it is the discrete logic gates between the
CPU registers that do the computational binding.
Obviously, if you cut the discrete logic gates which are binding whatever
it is that has the redness or grenness quality to the rest of
consciousness, it may still have a redness quality, but it will no longer
be a part of consciousness (it will be subconscious redness)

So, basically, once you discover what Giovanni's redness is.  You
computationally bind that into someone's consciousness and say: 'That is
Giovanni's redness" to which they could say something like:  "Wow, I've
never experienced a color like that before." which they may say if they are
red / green color blind, because they represent both red and green with
Giovanni's greenness.  They, having never experienced Giovani's redness
till then.  Certainly, whis is what people that suffer from achromatopsia
would say in most cases.

















On Sun, Apr 9, 2023 at 8:27 PM Giovanni Santostasi <gsantostasi at gmail.com>
wrote:

> I want to think in more concrete terms and in fact something that in real
> life could be done in a real experiment instead of a bunch of words like
> quality and stuff like that.
> I do the following experiment. I show 1000 people a screen with the large
> square with what I recognize as the color red. I measure something tangible
> and usually associated with brain activity. For example blood flow via fMRI
> or brain waves measured with an EEG or both preferably. I could add other
> measurable quantities like the level of neurotransmitters or even measure
> single neuron activity with a grid of very fine electrodes implanted in the
> brain. The more the better. But also reducing the number of inputs and see
> how much information I can extract with the minimum input could be
> interesting. I then train I do the same with an image of the color green.
> Then I train a neural network of given sophistication to make associations
> between neural activation and other brain correlates in the two cases.
> There are a lot of ways to process the information and interpret the data.
> I know by experience from similar studies (not necessarily focused on
> color) that one interesting way to show the data is to plot areas in the
> brain that were activated when the 2 colors were shown. What you will see
> is that there is a lot of overlap between people activity when they see the
> same color. We can also show that the activation for green is different
> than red. You could also create what is called a phase diagram. For
> example, you could show the value of activity (some level of blood flow or
> whatever) in region A which is mostly associated with red and region B
> which is mostly associated with green. Then each dot in the diagram
> represents level of activity in region A vs region B in each individual. We
> can color code (with red and green for example) the different experimental
> conditions for each individual and their value of A and B for each
> condition. What you would see in the end is 2 blobs in this space that are
> not perfectly separated but mostly so. Maybe there is a region that
> overlaps. You can then take another sample of people and do the same
> experiment and "guess" what color they are seeing by plotting their
> particular values of A and B on this map. If that dot (defined by
> coordinates A and B) falls squarely in the region associated with the red
> experience by most people than I can say with confidence (that can be even
> calculated mathematically as a probability) that person 1234 is seeing red
> vs green. Let's imagine now that there is subject 1359 that when shown what
> you and I recognize as red on the screen he responds with a set of (A,B)
> that falls in the green area. Not even in the overlapping region just all
> the way there where it is supposed to be a strong green response but on the
> screen we know we have red.
> What is the interpretation of this?
> This is a valid way to ask this question. It could be a problem with our
> measurement. We go back double check everything, we calibrate everything
> again and we get the same result. It could be that some rare condition
> changes the wiring of this person and it "translates" the physical
> information of red into a green pattern in his brain. Anyway, it is an
> interesting anomaly and we could focus on this anomaly and try to
> understand what happens. But most of the time science throws away such
> anomalies because they are outliers and we care more about averages and
> things in common among a large set of samples. But it still valid to focus
> on a single anomaly and figure out what happens.
> Now, another way to explore this in a scientific way would be to see what
> happens when I stimulate the brain areas in question. This is an important
> approach because we know in science we often look at correlation but
> correlation doesn't imply necessarily direct causation.
> I dealt with such a problem in neuroscience. In our case, we looked at
> slow waves that are associated with memory consolidation. We knew, from
> other studies, that slow waves are associated with memory performance. I
> can give a memory test to multiple people in the evening, give them a score
> and then test them in the morning on the same test but randomized in terms
> of the order of things to remember. People in general score better than in
> the evening showing that sleep has improved memory. I then can create a
> graph showing the average amplitude of the wave during the night vs their
> memory score (difference between performance in the evening vs morning).
> You can see there is a nice correlation between the 2 parameters.
> So slow waves are associated with the improvement in memory due to sleep
> but do they have a causal role?
> One way to answer this question would be to manipulate the waves and see
> if this manipulation gives a memory benefit that is different from a night
> of sleep without manipulation. We did exactly that and I have a patent for
> a device that can improve memory in people that is based on this particular
> manipulation of slow waves (we used short bursts of pink noise that are
> synchronized to the individual brain waves in real-time).
> So this is how you think about these problems in a scientific way instead
> of vague philosophical-like conundrums that are confusing and don't help us
> to understand how reality works.
>
> Giovanni
>
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> On Sun, Apr 9, 2023 at 6:34 PM Brent Allsop <brent.allsop at gmail.com>
> wrote:
>
>>
>>
>> On Sun, Apr 9, 2023 at 7:17 PM Giovanni Santostasi <gsantostasi at gmail.com>
>> wrote:
>>
>>> I'm saying that science is about map making. This is all what we can do
>>> and all what we should do.
>>> It is called modelling. It is the core of science.
>>> It is the most important concept to understand about science. We make
>>> models, good models are useful not necessarily true. In fact, a good model
>>> needs to have less information than what it represents to be useful. Apply
>>> all what I'm saying above to this entire business of understanding redness.
>>>
>>
>>
>>
>>> Science to explain red needs only to make a good model of what redness
>>> is, not to give the subjective experience of redness to somebody as if was
>>> some kind of enlightenment experience. I can use the model to make you
>>> experience red if I wanted by extracting what is essential in redness and
>>> reproduce that with some artificial mean (for example electrodes in your
>>> brain) even if you optical nerve was severed.
>>>
>>
>> I think this is exactly the same thing I'm trying to say.  Are you
>> saying we could come up with a model of your redness, and a model of your
>> greeness.  Then if you objectively observed someone else's brain as they
>> experienced their redness, yet you objectively matched this up with your
>> model of greenness, you could then know that his redness was like your
>> grenness?
>>
>> This is how you know we do understand what the heck red is. This is how
>>> we make airplane flight or this is how we communicate on these computers.
>>> Do you get what I'm trying to say?
>>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>> On Sun, Apr 9, 2023 at 7:17 PM Giovanni Santostasi <gsantostasi at gmail.com>
>> wrote:
>>
>>> I'm saying that science is about map making. This is all what we can do
>>> and all what we should do.
>>> It is called modelling. It is the core of science.
>>> It is the most important concept to understand about science. We make
>>> models, good models are useful not necessarily true. In fact, a good model
>>> needs to have less information than what it represents to be useful. Apply
>>> all what I'm saying above to this entire business of understanding redness.
>>> Science to explain red needs only to make a good model of what redness
>>> is, not to give the subjective experience of redness to somebody as if was
>>> some kind of enlightenment experience. I can use the model to make you
>>> experience red if I wanted by extracting what is essential in redness and
>>> reproduce that with some artificial mean (for example electrodes in your
>>> brain) even if you optical nerve was severed.
>>> This is how you know we do understand what the heck red is. This is how
>>> we make airplane flight or this is how we communicate on these computers.
>>> Do you get what I'm trying to say?
>>>
>>>
>>> On Sun, Apr 9, 2023 at 6:08 PM Brent Allsop <brent.allsop at gmail.com>
>>> wrote:
>>>
>>>>
>>>>
>>>> On Sun, Apr 9, 2023 at 6:59 PM Giovanni Santostasi <
>>>> gsantostasi at gmail.com> wrote:
>>>>
>>>>> *how do you eff the ineffable nature of colorness quality experience*
>>>>> s.
>>>>> You don't because it is not what knowledge or science is about. You
>>>>> are confusing the territory and the map. We already discussed this.
>>>>> You are basically putting the finger on a blue line on a map and
>>>>> saying "this is not a river because my finger is not wet". It is a freaking
>>>>> map. Or you are looking at the drawing of an engine in a very detailed blue
>>>>> print and say "I don't hear the engine noise or it doesn't move". Do you
>>>>> understand what I try to tell you?
>>>>>
>>>>
>>>> I'm trying to understand what you mean here, but it makes no sense to
>>>> me.  I'm also trying to point out that rednes is the "map" and not the
>>>> territory (the light, or the thing that reflects the light).   So why are
>>>> you saying you can't know what that map (which is not the territory)
>>>> subjectively like?
>>>>
>>>>
>>>>
>>>>
>>>>
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