[ExI] Red

[John Clark]

On Sun, Jul 5, 2026 at 9:29 AM Brent Allsop <brent.allsop at gmail.com> wrote:

 >> *Information is Physical
>> <https://www.w2agz.com/Library/Limits%20of%20Computation/Landauer%20Article,%20Physics%20Today%2044,%205,%2023%20(1991).pdf> *
>
>
> *> This paper clearly suffers from the objective grounding problem (how do
> you come up with an objective dictionary definition of redness?)*
>

*You can't. That's why the paper doesn't even try to do so, and you
shouldn't either. *

>
> *>> What causes one arrangement of on and off switches to produce
>> the redness quality while a different arrangement of on and off switches
>> produces the blueness quality? If it's a brute fact then absolutely
>> positively NOTHING does. And if it's not a brute fact then you're stuck
>> with an infinite regress. Take your pick. *
>>
>
> * > As I said here, and as I say over and over, my falsifiable prediction
> is that it is a brute physical fact that something has a redness quality. *
>


*If it's a brute fact that some thing causes the redness
quality then NOTHING causes that "something" to have the redness quality.
It having the redness quality is a fundamental fact about the universe.** You
can't keep asking "HOW" questions because if it's a brute fact then you've
reached the rock-bottom of reality.  *



> *>> You cannot produce one single scrap of evidence to support that claim.** Philosophers
>> have been navel gazing about the nature of subjectivity and consciousness
>> for over 1000 years, and in all that time they have not advanced our
>> understanding of those phenomena by one nanometer. Not even by one
>> Planck Length! By contrast, look at the GARGANTUAN amount of progress that
>> has been made in just the last 10 years by ignoring subjectivity and
>> consciousness completely and concentrating on discovering more about the
>> nature of intelligence. *
>> *And you think we should go back to **navel gazing?!*
>>
>
>  *> I'm not talking philosophy, nor navel gazing. *


*I think that's exactly what you're talking about.  *


> *> I'm predicting that glutamate will be falsified (someone will
> experience redness without glutamate)*
>

*And I predict that if you discover a correlation between a glutamate
molecule (or any other molecule) with someone making a noise with their
mouth that sounds like  "I am experiencing redness" then I will be able to
discover a correlation between a certain arrangement of on and off switches
inside the electronic processor of an Artificial Intelligence that will
make a noise through a speaker that sounds like "I am experiencing
redness". So after all these "experiments" what have we learned at the end
of the day? We have learned the same thing that consciousness experiments
always tell us about the nature of reality, absolutely nothing. *


> * > I am predicting that science will never find any "function" or any
> series of ones or zeros for which it is a brute fact that it has a redness
> quality.*
>

*I am predicting science will never find a molecule that can do that
either. And I will go further, science will never be able to say what a
subjective thing like a color qualia is "like" because they are "like"
nothing else in existence except for themselves, they certainly are not
some objective thing which apparently is the only sort of thing that would
satisfy you.  *

*> I don't see any way to falsify your claims,*
>

*I see a pattern of on and off switches that I think will cause the AI to
make a noise through its speaker that sounds like "I am experiencing the
redness qualia" but instead the noise sounds like "I am not experiencing
the redness qualia". So I am wrong and it's back to the drawing board for
me, I'll need to look for a different pattern of switches. *


> *If you're not doing navel gazing, then how is functionalism going to be
> falsified?*
>

*Charles Darwin could've answered that question over 150 years ago, find a
way for Natural Selection to select for something that it can't see. Good
luck in completing that little task. *

*John K Clark *
>
>
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