[ExI] [Extropolis] red

[Brent Allsop]

On Sat, Jan 21, 2023 at 10:23 AM Ben Zaiboc via extropy-chat <
extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote:

> On 21/01/2023 13:28, Brent wrote:
>
            Yes exactly.
>
            The conscious visual knowledge rendered from one eye uses
> glutamate, and the knowledge rendered from the other eye is rendered with
> something slightly different.
>
On Fri, Jan 20, 2023 at 3:17 PM William Flynn Wallace <foozler83 at gmail.com>
> wrote:
>
>> Also from Jong:  "Suzanne Kane studies vision in peacocks; she has a
>> slight difference in her color vision in each eye, so that one gives her a
>> slightly reddish tint."
>>
>> Explain that with glutamate, will you?   bill w
>>
> I think conventional, established neuroscience can probably do that.
>
> Of course, the 'with glutamate' part is a bit of a red herring, as we know
> that any other neurotransmitter would do just as well, being simply a way
> for one neuron to give its neighbour neurons a nudge.
>

You are describing the way abstract computers work, where everything is
just interpretations of interpretations (one nudge leading to the next.)
Consciousness is different.  Conscious knowledge is represented directly on
intrinsic qualities like redness, greenness, and in this case part of the
subjective experience including something that has a "slightly
reddish tint" along with the normal redness and greenness.  A system made
out  of nothing but nudges has no physical qualities like redness and
greenness, on which it represents information.  Of all our objective
descriptions of stuff in the brain, one of those must be a description of
subjective redness.  It is a yet to be falsified possibility that our
objective description of glutamate, reacting in a synapse, is a description
of subjective redness.  In other words, it behaves the way it does (nudges
something else in a particular way), because of its redness quality.  If
someone experiences redness without glutamate, that hypothesis is then
falsified, so you move on to something else in the brain, till you find
something that does behave the way it does, because of its redness
quality.  (i.e. that theory can't be falsified.)  So 'glutamate' is just a
temporary one of many possible stand-ins for something physical, in the
brain, which behaves the way it does because of its redness quality.


> (Actually, thinking about it, it's probably not a neurological thing at
> all. The most likely explanation is going to be that the cornea or lens of
> one eye is acting as a colour filter).
>

The fact that a colour filter can change your knowledge of the strawberry
from redness to greeness proves that the qualities are of something in your
brain, not of the light or the strawberry.  You could just as easily add
the red/green signal inverter between the retina and the optic nerve.  In
that case the red strawberry, and the red light landing on the retina,
would all "seem green."   The question is, what is that greenness, if not
something in the brain?

For more information see the recently submitted for possible
publication: "Physicists Don't
Understand Color
<https://www.dropbox.com/s/k9x4uh83yex4ecw/Physicists%20Don%27t%20Understand%20Color.docx?dl=0>
"

@John Clark <johnkclark at gmail.com> Are you happy?  I didn't use my image
which you hate.  But, since I didn't use the image, I bet nobody will
understand what I'm trying to say about representing information with a
physical redness quality being different from representing information with
an abstract word like 'red' made of ones and zeros, which is what nudging
computers use to represent 'red' information.
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.extropy.org/pipermail/extropy-chat/attachments/20230121/a07ec7ea/attachment.htm>