[ExI] What is "Elemental Redness"?

Mon May 1 21:29:38 UTC 2023

*what is different between a red experience and a green experience, because
information patterns don't have a color, but experiences do.*Just
philosophers can say the most obvious things and then pretend that they are
so profound and meaningful.
OF COURSE!
But that is the same with the blueprint of a house or the technical
drawings of an engine, or a music sheet, or a computer program.
ALL THESE THINGS ARE NOT THE THING THAT ARE SUPPOSED TO REPRESENT !!!
This thing really drives me crazy.
Why it is different for consciousness or damn colors? If I give you a
detailed explanation of all the processes involved that are responsible for
consciousness is obvious that the explanation doesn't re-create
consciousness. It is a damn explanation, EXACTLY like a blueprint is not a
house, you cannot live inside a blueprint.
Why do we give this special treatment to consciousness that we require a
scientific explanation to give us a direct experience of what the
explanation tries to explain?
Can somebody make me understand?
The only thing I can imagine is that consciousness is a special case
because it happens inside us. Ok, so what I don't need to tell you how it
feels to see red, you already see red (most of us), who cares if it is not
the same red I see? Not 2 houses are the same even if built from the same
blueprint.
Nobody says, well I just read the blueprint but you know what it doesn't
tell me anything about how it feels to live in a house.
But to me, people that say a perfectly hypothetical scientific explanation
of redness are saying the same type of completely ridiculous nonsense.
Giovanni

On Mon, May 1, 2023 at 2:04 PM Darin Sunley <dsunley at gmail.com> wrote:

> 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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>>>>>
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