[ExI] Red

[Jason Resch]

On Tue, Jun 30, 2026, 3:37 PM Brent Allsop via extropy-chat <
extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote:

>
> Hi Ben,
> Exactly, qualities like redness are 'mental construct' rendered into our
> subjective knowledge of the world in our head
> <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=suTugEv9F-U&t=8s> .
>
> There are all kinds of evidence, like magenta, that there is a LOT of
> difference between patterns of reflected light and the qualities of our
> knowledge of such.
>
> What is a 'mental construct' if not something objectively observable in
> our brain?  In addition to our objective descriptions of those mental
> constructs (we don't know which is a description of redness, but it must be
> something), there is some reason the redness quality is behaving the way we
> objecetively observe it behaving.
>


My argument against Brent's intrinsicism (the idea that quale depend on
intrinsic physicochemical properties of the neural substrate) is as follows:

There are some 20,000 genes which means that there are no more than roughly
20,000 unique chemicals/molecules within the brain. Let's round up and say
30,000.

But this number, 30,000, is smaller than the 1,000,000 unique colors
tetrachromats can see, and much smaller than the 100,000,000 colors human
tetrachromats can see.

For the intrinsicist to accommodate this he must say that quale depend on
the relative concentrations or proportions of fundamental primary color
molecules in some part of the brain. But once the intrinsicist makes this
move, he is already retreating to high-level information states (e.g., the
molecular concentrations) as being definitive in creating that conscious
qualitative experience. But then if it is high-level information states
that define qualitative states, how is that different from functionalism?

Jason



>
> On Tue, Jun 30, 2026 at 5:39 AM Ben Zaiboc via extropy-chat <
> extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote:
>
>> On 30/06/2026 11:45, John K Clark wrote:
>> > On Mon, Jun 29, 2026 at 5:39 PM Ben Zaiboc via extropy-chat <
>> extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote:
>> >
>> >     > We have a colour called Magenta, but it doesn't correspond to any
>> wavelength of light, or any band of wavelengths.
>> >
>> >
>> > According to Google: "Magenta is a unique, extraspectral color that
>> does not exist as a single wavelength of light in the visible spectrum.
>> Instead, it is created by the human brain filling in the gap to bridge the
>> opposite ends of the color spectrum—mixing short-wave blue light and
>> long-wave red light"
>> >
>> > And if you decrease the amount of red light a little and increase the
>> amount of blue then your brain interprets that as purple instead of magenta.
>>
>>
>> Indeed. So, I'm wondering what Brent will have to say about this. Magenta
>> doesn't seem to fit into his view of things, as it cannot be a 'physical
>> property' of anything, it only exists as a mental construct, or a
>> hallucination of our brains.
>>
>> --
>> Ben
>>
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