[ExI] Why stop at glutamate?

Tue Apr 11 08:56:03 UTC 2023

Geometry of color perception.
https://www.cell.com/current-biology/pdf/S0960-9822(20)31605-5.pdf

On Tue, Apr 11, 2023 at 1:28 AM Giovanni Santostasi <gsantostasi at gmail.com>
wrote:

> I cannot imagine anybody reading this paper thinking that a qualia is a
> fundamental property of experience. There is not such a thing, lol. Even
> the perception of color is a pretty damn complicated thing involved several
> brain layers and area and complex processing, as I said before nothing
> fundamental, simple or direct about it.
> https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.1911041117
>
> Giovanni
>
>
> On Tue, Apr 11, 2023 at 1:22 AM Giovanni Santostasi <gsantostasi at gmail.com>
> wrote:
>
>> Ok here is a paper that should clarify a lot on this topic of color
>> perception.
>> Let's read it and see what we get from it. It seems to me that again they
>> simply used fMRI (so basically brain pattern) to deduce all what there is
>> to deduce about redness and the similar.
>> Neural representations of perceptual color experience in the human
>> ventral visual pathwayhttps://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.1911041117
>>
>>
>> On Mon, Apr 10, 2023 at 4:48 PM Jason Resch via extropy-chat <
>> extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote:
>>
>>>
>>>
>>> On Mon, Apr 10, 2023, 7:08 PM Brent Allsop via extropy-chat <
>>> extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote:
>>>
>>>>
>>>>
>>>> On Mon, Apr 10, 2023 at 11:11 AM Jason Resch via extropy-chat <
>>>> extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote:
>>>>
>>>>> On Sun, Apr 9, 2023 at 5:20 PM Giovanni Santostasi via extropy-chat <
>>>>> extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote:
>>>>>
>>>>>> If this doesn't destroy completely anybody illusion that the a brain
>>>>>> made of meat (and particular stuff like glutamate) I don't know what else
>>>>>> it could. These people will always believe that meat brains are necessary
>>>>>> because God made them so. No amound of science would convince them.
>>>>>>
>>>>> 2) You can train an AI to recognize activation patterns in the brain
>>>>>> and associate them with particular stimuli. This has been tried with words
>>>>>> and even images both in wake and dreaming state. Here an example that
>>>>>> should blow everybody minds:
>>>>>> https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2022.11.18.517004v2.full.pdf
>>>>>> Again, from this study we can see that it doesn't matter how the
>>>>>> pattern is generated, but that there is a pattern of activation. These
>>>>>> patterns are unique for each individual but statistically they are similar
>>>>>> enough that after training over many subjects you can give a statistical
>>>>>> estimate that the person is seeing or even thinking about something in
>>>>>> particular. Again, IT WORKS people !
>>>>>>
>>>>>
>>>>> I consider this a knock-down argument against the functional role of
>>>>> glutamate (or other molecules) in the sensation of red. These tests use
>>>>> only blood flow data, which is a proxy for neural activity. They are not
>>>>> measuring ratios of specific neurotransmitters or molecules, or
>>>>> introspecting the activity within the cell, the fMRI looks only at which
>>>>> neurons are more vs. less active. And yet, from this data we can extract
>>>>> images and colors. This proves that neural activity embodies this
>>>>> information.
>>>>>
>>>>
>>>> I guess I've failed to communicate something important about why we use
>>>> glutamate.  The primary reason we use glutamate is precisely because of
>>>> its ease of falsifiability.  I fully expect redness to be falsified
>>>> (someone will experience redness with no glutamate present) and something
>>>> different from glutamate will then be tried, and eventually something will
>>>> be found to be experimentally proven to be redness.  Easy and obvious
>>>> falsifiability is what everyone is missing, so THAT is what I'm most
>>>> attempting to communicate with the glutamate example.
>>>>
>>>> If you guys think there are knock down arguments for why a redness
>>>> quality is simply due to recursive network configurations (I am not yet
>>>> convinced, and am still predicting otherwise (see below), and it's much
>>>> easier to say glutamate than whatever stuff you guys are talking about,
>>>> which nobody is concisely stating, and I have problems understanding), then
>>>> please, every time I say 'glutamate', do a substitution for anything you
>>>> like such as  'Recursive network model A', or any other yet to be falsified
>>>> theory.  And let's leave it up to the experimentalists to prove who is
>>>> right, like good, humble, theoretical scientists should.
>>>>
>>>>
>>>> P.S.
>>>> At least that paper
>>>> <https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2022.11.18.517004v2.full.pdf> you
>>>> referenced has pictures (composed of real qualities), not just abstract
>>>> text (tells you nothing about qualities), as text only would be completely
>>>> meaningless, right?
>>>> But why don't you guys ask the publishers of that paper, how they came
>>>> up with the qualities displayed on the images depicting what they are
>>>> detecting?
>>>> Here is a link to Jack Galant's work
>>>> <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6FsH7RK1S2E&t=1s>, done over a decade
>>>> ago, to which all these modern examples are just derivative works, easily
>>>> done with modern AI tools.
>>>> When I saw Jack Galant's work
>>>> <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6FsH7RK1S2E&t=1s> back then, I knew
>>>> he had a problem determining what qualities to display on his screens,
>>>> depicting what he was detecting.  The fMRI only providing abstract
>>>> qualityless data which is meaningless without a quality grounded dictionary.
>>>> So I called him and asked him how he knew what qualities to display.
>>>> He immediately admitted they "false-colored" them (Jack Gallant's words).
>>>> They used the original color codes in the digital images they were showing
>>>> to their subjects, to determine what color to display.  In other words,
>>>> they were grounding their colors to physical light, which is nothing like
>>>> either the properties of a strawberry, which the light merely represents,
>>>> or the very different properties of conscious knowledge they are detecting
>>>> and describing with qualityless abstract text.  As Giovanni admits, they
>>>> are correcting for any changes in physical properties or qualities they are
>>>> detecting so they can falsely map all those diverse sets of properties they
>>>> are detecting back to the same false colored light, blinding them to any
>>>> possible inverted qualities they may be detecting in all that diversity.
>>>>
>>>> By the way, I added this Japanese paper
>>>> <https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2022.11.18.517004v2.full.pdf> to
>>>> the list of yet another example of quality blind papers, including Jack
>>>> Galant's work that only uses one falsely grounded abstract word for all
>>>> things representing 'red' here
>>>> <https://canonizer.com/topic/603-Color-Exprnc-Observation-Issue/1-Agreement>
>>>> .
>>>>
>>>> If anyone finds a peer reviewed paper that is not quality blind. (other
>>>> than mine
>>>> <https://www.dropbox.com/s/k9x4uh83yex4ecw/Physicists%20Don%27t%20Understand%20Color.docx?dl=0>,
>>>> which is about to be published) will you please let me know about one?  As
>>>> I will trust someone that believes and understands that qualities are
>>>> necessarily real properties of real hallucinations in our brain.  I predict
>>>> they are just the physical properties they are detecting but only
>>>> abstractly describing and then false coloring.
>>>>
>>>
>>>
>>> Brent,
>>>
>>> I appreciate that added detail and correction. If the colors in the
>>> reconstructed images are false colors or inferred by the AI from the
>>> reconstructed image then I retract my statement of it being a knockdown
>>> argument against the molecular basis of color qualia. I still suspect color
>>> information is encoded in the patterns of neural activity, but it may be at
>>> a low enough level that the fMRI lacks the spatial resolution to detect it.
>>>
>>> Jason
>>> _______________________________________________
>>> extropy-chat mailing list
>>> extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org
>>> http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat
>>>
>>
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