[ExI] What is "Elemental Redness"?

[Darin Sunley]

The analogy to Mary's Room is quite direct.

Mary most certainly learns something new when she sees color for the first
time.

Analogously, when you experience a color, something similarly new is
happening, something other than patterns of neural firings correlated to
the experience of color. [Mary, of course, understands the neural firing
patterns perfectly, but still learned something new - what it was like to
experience them.] This something is correlated to neural firings, but
neural firings (which do not have a color) are insufficient to generate
color.

Put another way, when you look out at a green field, there is nothing in
your brain that is the same color as either blue or green. The blue and
green photons all landed in your retinal cells and slightly increased their
temperature. Something is causing the blue and green experiences, but the
neuron spike trains in your optic nerves cannot be - they don't have that
property so they can't possibly be causally transmitting that property from
your eyes into your brain.

The modelling/imagination capability of the frontal cortex is instructive.
When you imagine that green field, your visual field is caused to have the
same neural firing patterns /as if/ a train of neural firing spikes
encoding green and blue photons arriving in your eyes had just arrived in
your visual cortex. But this still doesn't explain why a particular neural
firing pattern is experienced with a certain experience we call green, and
another is experienced with a certain experience we call blue. The
differences in information content in the neural firing patterns cannot be
causing the difference in experiences, because as far as we can tell,
experience isn't made of information at all.

As to what experience is made of? That's the big question. The temptation
is to say "information", because information is the only other immaterial
thing we have a half-decent understanding of. Another temptation is to say
"quantum effects", because nobody understands those either. But there are
serious, fundamental differences between information, quantum effects, and
visual experiences. There is no particular reason, except that they're all
weird and we don't know how they work, to think they're even remotely
related.


On Mon, May 1, 2023 at 2:31 PM Giovanni Santostasi <gsantostasi at gmail.com>
wrote:

> I still don't get why we talk about qualia being elemental or fundamental.
> Because they seem to be vivid and direct? Doesn't the color illusion
> experiment I showed demonstrate there is nothing fundamental or direct
> about colors? They seem to me complex artifacts of several brain regions.
> What is elemental about given what we know about how the brain works? I
> don't mean from a silly philosophical point of view but from a scientific
> one.
> Giovanni
>
> On Mon, May 1, 2023 at 1:09 PM Darin Sunley via extropy-chat <
> extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote:
>
>> "Systematically bridg[ing] between [material] physical and [immaterial]
>> mental characteristics" is the literal expression of Chalmers' "Hard
>> Problem" of consciousness.
>>
>> If you wanna be a famous philosopher, all you have to do is make even
>> infinitesimal progress along those lines. Because no one has yet.
>>
>> On Mon, May 1, 2023 at 1:34 PM Gadersd via extropy-chat <
>> extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote:
>>
>>> it's a very odd sort of causation where the physical properties of the
>>> presumptive proximate cause have nothing to do with the characteristics of
>>> the caused phenomena.
>>>
>>>
>>> It would be better to say “seem to have nothing…” Not being aware of a
>>> connection does not imply that there isn’t a way to systematically bridge
>>> between physical and mental characteristics.
>>>
>>> On May 1, 2023, at 1:26 PM, Darin Sunley via extropy-chat <
>>> extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote:
>>>
>>> Qualia certainly correlate to physical reality, but declaring causation
>>> there seems like a bit of a stretch - at least a begging of the question of
>>> materialism.
>>>
>>> it's a very odd sort of causation where the physical properties of the
>>> presumptive proximate cause have nothing to do with the characteristics of
>>> the caused phenomena.
>>>
>>> On Mon, May 1, 2023, 10:46 AM Ben Zaiboc via extropy-chat <
>>> extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote:
>>>
>>>>
>>>> On 01/05/2023 17:05, Will Steinberg answered:
>>>> > It means, I think, "the conformation of physical reality that
>>>> produces
>>>> > the red quale, on the layer of physical reality that is responsible
>>>> > for qualia"
>>>>
>>>>
>>>> So, a brain?
>>>>
>>>> A brain is 'Elemental Redness'??
>>>>
>>>> I'm reading "conformation of physical reality" as meaning "arrangement
>>>> of stuff", and "the layer of physical reality that is responsible for
>>>> qualia" as "the organisational level of matter that gives rise to
>>>> subjective experiences", i.e. (as far as we know) neural circuits, in a
>>>> brain.
>>>>
>>>> I see no reason to use the word 'elemental' for that. In fact it's
>>>> wrong. This is far from elemental.
>>>>
>>>> If I'm on the wrong track (which seems likely), well, I did ask for
>>>> "simple terms".
>>>>
>>>> Ben
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