[ExI] Red

[Brent Allsop]

Hi John,



On Sun, Jul 5, 2026 at 12:50 PM John Clark <johnkclark at gmail.com> wrote:

> 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. *
>

OK, Then, can we both agree that we are both doing theoretical science?  I
am predicting that something objective in the brain is behaving the way it
does, because of its redness quality.  And you are making a different,
equally falsifiable prediction: that a pattern of on and off switches will
result in a redness quality.  So, now it is up to the experimentalists to
conduct the experiment, and prove to us, which one is right, if any, and
which one is wrong, forcing both of us into THE ONE true scientific
consensus camp.


> > *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. *
>

I believe I've addressed this assertion of yours you continue to make, many
times, but here it goes again:
There are two types of computation, one is drastically more efficient than
the other.  Since one is more efficient, that is why evolution selected for
computation on top of phenomenal qualities, rather than brute force
discrete logic gates.  And the reason evolution selected redness, to
represent the strawberry, was because it knew that if the animal focused on
that quality while ignoring the green leaves, it would be more efficient at
selecting the red strawberries from the green leaves if it used something
in the brain that had that redness quality.  This is simply because a
redness quality stands out in a system of other qualities.  As Hoffman and
others point out with their "fitness beats truth" theorem, evolution
selects for survivability, not for truth. Nature certainly doesn't select
for the grossly inefficient way we're still doing computation (which
requires dictionaries for everything to achieve substrate independence).
It's much more efficient to run directly on the fundamental qualities of
nature, even if those qualities do, (using some magic?) arise from 1s and
0s.
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