[ExI] What is "Elemental Magenta"?

[Ben Zaiboc]

On 01/05/2023 23:57, Darin Sunley wrote:
> Put another way, when you look out at a green field...

Can we at least agree that there is a distinction between 'you' and 'the 
world'? That there is a distinct boundary to your self, beyond which is 
everything that is not yourself?

And that boundary, which is studded with sensors (and actuators, but 
that's not so important for this discussion), can be seen as an 
interface between ourselves and the world?

I'm going to assume the answer is "yes".

My thesis is that beyond this boundary, all we can know about the 
outside world is provided by these sensors. So whatever information they 
can provide us, is all we have to go on, to make sense of what the 
outside world actually contains.

If you accept that, then you have to acknowledge that patterns of neural 
firings (those spike trains again!) are the only input we receive from 
the world.

Looking at it that way, the outside world is a 'great unknown' that we 
have to make some sense of, using binary signals passed through nerve 
fibres. Binary signals, not colours or pictures of horses or Beethoven's 
5th symphony.

And we know, through many experiments, that these signals each encode 
just a tiny part of our whole sensorium. It's not like a TV broadcast 
where a stream of digits builds up a complete picture. Instead it's a 
massive jumble of small details, like 'here's a sound frequency of 
440Hz, here's a patch of high illumination next to a patch of darkness, 
here's a high-intensity pressure on the point of the left elbow', and so 
on. Millions of such signals, flooding in all the time, in no particular 
order, but each signal is in it's own channel. And the channels merge 
and split and feed back on each other in myriad complex ways. There is 
no colour, no horse, no green field. Just lots and lots of tiny 
individual signals on their own channels, such as (on the x,y coordinate 
right visual field channel) a signal signifying strong activation of an 
L-type cone, and so-on.

This is not some theory I've dreamed up. It's what we know about 
ourselves from many decades of research. It's as close to a 'fact' as 
you could ever hope to get.

So what do we do with all these signals? We weave them into experiences. 
And we often attach labels to the experiences. "A magenta teacup" is a 
label for a visual experience that we construct from these signals, or 
from memories of signals, or a combination of both.

There is no 'teacup' or 'magenta' in the outside world. Magenta is 
obvious (which is why I chose it. It has to be a construct, as it 
doesn't actually exist as a wavelength of light in the outslde world), 
teacup maybe less so.

My point is, we don't 'look out on a green field', we construct a green 
field as an internal model, or experience, and label it as such, and 
link the label and the model to a certain set of spatial coordinates 
(how we do that is an interesting story in itself).

Activating the model is having the experience, or reliving the memory, 
constructing the concepts of 'green' and 'field' on the fly, putting 
them together with other memories and models and lo, we resolve the 
great unknown to "I see the green field at the back of our cousin Bert's 
house".

Built entirely of binary neural signals.

There is no mystery here. No inexplicable 'explanatory gap', no 'hard 
problem'.

And no objective' elemental magenta'.

Ben