[ExI] are qualia communicable? Was Why stop at glutamate?

Brent Allsop brent.allsop at gmail.com
Sat Apr 15 02:49:00 UTC 2023


Hi Jason,

On Fri, Apr 14, 2023 at 8:39 PM Jason Resch via extropy-chat <
extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote:

> An elemental quality of everything Jason is describing is a standalone
>> pixel of a redness quality.
>>
>
> I don't believe in such things. A pixel of redness only exists by virtue
> of it's relations to all the rest of a vastly complex brain. You can't
> pluck it out of the brain and treat it as an independent elemental entity.
>

Yes, we are simply making different falsifiable predictions, here.  It is
now up to the experimentalist to falsify at least one of our competing
predictions.
I don't think we have a camp on canonizer, yet based on anything like your
competing idea:  "A pixel of redness only exists by virtue of it's
relations to all the rest of a vastly complex brain."  I'd sure love to get
this canonized, somewhere, to see if anyone else would support it.  I'm
very doubtful, but that belief could be falsified.


> only the elemental qualities does.
>>
> This pixel of elemental redness, and the resulting change from redness to
>> greenness, must identity match up with some objective description of the
>> same.
>> It is simply discovering what this identity is, and figuring out how
>> elemental redness can be computationally bound with all the other stuff
>> that would be different, in different brains.
>> My prediction is that we will discover which of all our descriptions of
>> stuff in the brain is a description of redness, We finally know which camp
>> is THE ONE, we finally know the true color properties of things, hard
>> problem solved, we can eff the ineffable, since our terms and properties of
>> our subjective experiences would then be objectively grounded.
>>
>
> I don't see how you can identify the common element between two
> individuals' red experience when there's no way (that I see) to determine
> whether or when two individuals even have the same red experience. Can you
> explain this process to me?
>

You identify whatever P1, glutamate, or whatever it is that is the
objective description of a subjective pixel with a redness quality.  Then,
if you see one person representing red light with that, and the other
representing green light with that, you can then say in an objectively
grounded way:

His redness(p1) is like the other's greenness(also p1), which you both call
red.
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