[ExI] Red

[Ben Zaiboc]

On 06/07/2026 20:21, Brent Allsop wrote:

> On Mon, Jul 6, 2026 at 8:01 AM Ben Zaiboc via extropy-chat <extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote:
>
>> Brent,
>>
>> Your claims seem to me so extraordinary and so completely outside what I know about how brains work (and what science has taught us about things in general), that I thought it might be a good idea to confirm that you are in fact saying what it seems to me that you're saying.
>>
>> One problem I have is that your language is so obscure and elaborate that I have difficulty telling if I have in fact understood you or not.
>>
>> So, let me know which of the following I've got right and wrong, about what you are claiming:
>>
>> * Certain material substances (presently unknown) possess properties that can be called 'phenomenal qualities' (which means the feeling of being something, or what it is like to be or experience something).
>>
>> * These properties are /fundamental/ properties, i.e. low-level physical properties, on a par with electromagnetism, gravity, the strong and weak nuclear forces, etc.
>
> Yes, but...
> Phenomenal properties of physics have objectively observable causal properties, but describing or naming these causal properties doesn't tell you what they are like, without a dictionary.

I don't understand what you are saying here. "phenomenal properties of physics" just means "physics", no? If not, please explain the difference.

"objectively observable causal properties" = observable properties = properties (if there are any unobservable properties, we won't know what they are).

So, physics has properties. Not sure what you are getting at by this, but we have discovered certain physical laws, so I'll go with that.

Describing or naming them doesn't tell you what they are like, without a dictionary. (what they are like?? You mean what they are?)

Ok, so look things up in a dictionary. It will explain what the laws of thermodynamics are, for example, what Boyle's law is, etc.

> We are already objectively detecting and describing these causal properties; i.e. they are a subset of all the fundamental causal properties we know. We just don't know which causal properties are for which qualities.

We detect and describe properties of things, ok (I don't see the relevance of the word 'causal').
"We don't know which properties are for which qualities". Hm, this is a bit ambiguous. Properties include qualities and quantities, so you'll have to explain this.
Give an example of what you mean here.

> It's just that describing or naming them (like the word 'red') doesn't tell you what they are like, without a dictionary.
> It's like is 700 nm light red or green? You can't know without a dictionary.

Or you could use the internet: "700 nm light is red. It is at the longer wavelength end of the visible light spectrum".
So now you know.

> We say the strawberry reflects red light because of its red property. It's like that, only the reflection of light is the wrong set of physics, as we know redness is a property of something in the brain - not the strawberry.

There's no such thing as 'the wrong set of physics'. Physics may not currently have everything right, but there's only one set of physics. It develops over time as we learn more.

To say that "redness is a property of something in the brain - not the strawberry" is missing the point. Redness is perceived in the brain /because/ the strawberry is red. If strawberries were yellow, we'd perceive yellowness. It's a chain of events. Light hits the strawberry, it absorbs some wavelengths of light and reflects the rest. Our eyes receive the reflected light. Signals from the retina (and other places) produce the sensation of 'strawberry red'. This all happens acccording to the same set of physics - the only one we have.

> Something in the brain has the redness property, not the strawberry.
> Neurons can do subjective binding of these objectively observable properties, enabling us to directly apprehend them.

You'll have to explain what you mean by 'subjective binding'.

> Cause and effect observation is always different sets of causally downstream properties - representing different things. You always need a dictionary to get back to the original. Because of this, objective observation can be mistaken.

I don't understand what you mean by this.

> Direct apprehension is infallible, the same idea as "I think, therefore I am."

What on earth is 'direct apprehension'? I'm pretty sure that we don't 'directly' apprehend anything. I don't even know what mechanism could exist to enable that. Everything that we experience in our minds gets there via an indirect route. Often extremely indirect, to the extent that it makes sense to say that we make up most of what we experience, extrapolated from some pretty sparse information from the environment, coming in to our sensory apparatus and transformed many times into different forms (e.g., we have many different visual maps in the brain, that take information from the eyes and transform it, many times, into what we actually experience as sight: https://web.stanford.edu/~bobd/cgi-bin/pubs/pdfs/Wandell_VisualClusters_RSTB05.pdf) . And what we experience is very fallible, as can be seen by the many illusions we can fall victim to.

--
Ben
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