[ExI] Red

[Ben Zaiboc]

On 07/07/2026 00:41, Brent Allsop wrote:
>
> When you look at an image like this:
> bent_pencil.png
> You can doubt the pencil is bent, you can doubt the pencil is really yellow, and you can doubt the pencil even exists.
>
> But you can't doubt that your knowledge of the pencil exists, you can't doubt your knowledge of the pencil is bent, nor can you doubt that your knowledge of the pencil has your yellowness quality.
>
> You experience the yellowness of your knowledge of the pencil and the orangeness of the eraser as one unified 'gestalt' experience.  You can't achieve that via seperate channels/pixels.  Some kind of direct apprehension or unification of qualities is required.
>
> And by "wrong physics," we must remember that subjective qualities must have causal properties we can objectively observe.  It's just that cause and effect observation doesn't tell you what they are like.  An example of wrong physics would be that glutamate behaves the way it does, because of its redness quality.  But that may be the wrong set of physics.  It might be glycine, that has the redness quality.  Glutamate might have your grenness quality.  We simply need nature to tell us, through direct apprehension, which one is which, so we can have our grounded dictionary of the physical qualities of what we are objectively observing.
>
> And that kind of gestalt unification of qualities is a far more powerful computational mechanism than brute-force discrete logic gate binding of abstract binary numbers.


What is this??

I've asked you for explanations of your terms, and you are replying /using exactly the same terms/.

Unsurprisingly, I still don't know what you mean.

Again, I'm going to have to make a guess at what your convoluted and baffling language is trying to express.

When I look at the pencil in the glass of water, I'm aware of two factors. One is my perception of a strangely-bent pencil, that doesn't agree with my normal experience with pencils not in glasses of water. Another is my knowledge and experience of refraction and how it distorts the appearance of objects. I don't 'doubt that the pencil is bent', I know it's not bent. The appearance of the pencil corresponds to my internal model of pencils, with no confusion, because the model I have includes the appearance of pencils half in water. This is the same as seeing a pencil end-on, and not being fooled into thinking that it's a flat disc, because my pencil-model includes views of the pencil from all angles.

I don't know why I would doubt that the pencil is yellow, as the ambient light and the reflections from the glass and water lead me to trust my perception of it. I'm confident enough that it's yellow, and that it probably exists (it could be a computer-generated image, or even a photo-realistic painting, but that doesn't really matter, it /could/ be a real pencil, and that's all my pattern-matching mechanisms care about).

> "you can't doubt that your knowledge of the pencil exists"

I'm tentatively interpreting this to mean that I know I'm /seeing/ the pencil, whether or not it actually exists.

> "you can't doubt your knowledge of the pencil is bent"

This is harder to understand. I don't know how my 'knowledge of' (my experience of seeing?) can be 'bent'.

> "nor can you doubt that your knowledge of the pencil has your yellowness quality."

I think that means that I'm confident that the pencil is indeed yellow, because it looks yellow to me. (You could say that I'm confident that the 'yellow' - 'yellowness' relation is intact)

> "You experience the yellowness of your knowledge of the pencil and the orangeness of the eraser as one unified 'gestalt' experience.  You can't achieve that via separate channels/pixels.  Some kind of direct apprehension or unification of qualities is required."

Good grief.
I experience the yellow pencil and orange eraser as a single item?
Well, I suppose so. I can also separate them into two distinct things. I have to say that when thinking of the pencil, I wasn't really including the eraser, but now that you point it out, I can. Ditto the metal ferrule that holds the eraser. In fact, the whole scene can be experienced in many different ways, many different views that include or exclude various features. Do we notice the hand holding the glass? How it is being held? The ridges on the bottom of the glass? The shadows on the wall, and which ones? etc.

I don't know what you're trying to say with the rest of the paragraph. Maybe that the mental image of the pencil is composed of individual pixels? (not quite accurate, but the details of how vision and computer screens are different don't really matter that much here).
Naturally, the information coming in via my optic nerves is in many individual parts, and needs to be integrated in a lot of different ways before I have a conscious experience of seeing 'a pencil'. If this is what you mean by 'direct apprehension', then it's a misnomer, and certain to confuse anyone reading it. Say 'integration of information' instead. Direct apprehension means something altogether different (not to mention impossible. See 'grounding' below).

So, what I /think/ you're saying is that I see a yellow pencil with an orange eraser in a glass of water because my brain sifts, sorts and joins together many separate pieces of information from my eyes, and combines this with existing models of things like pencils and glasses of water, to produce a comprehensible and familiar image.
If so, then I agree.

> "And by 'wrong physics,' we must remember that subjective qualities must have causal properties we can objectively observe."

I think you are using these words in the wrong way. That's why these statements make no sense. You've already said that you don't think there is any difference between Subjective and Objective, so putting those words in a sentence is redundant (unless you want to change your mind and we can restore these words to their usual meaning).

'Properties of things' includes both qualities and quantities, so saying that qualities must have properties makes no sense. It's the wrong way round, like saying that meat must have sausages.

There's no involvement of any physics here, right or wrong.

> "... cause and effect observation ..."

I don't know what kind of observation this is. Is it some special kind of observation that we don't normally do, or is it just another of your needlessly elaborate phrases that can be translated as "observation"?

I'm not sure that this can be correct, because you would then be saying "observation doesn't tell you what they are like" (referring to the properties of objects), which is clearly not true. The whole point of observing things is so that you can know what they are like. I only know that my kitchen table is like my kitchen chairs in certain aspects, but unlike my garden table in those same aspects, and that the kitchen and garden tables are alike in other aspects, and different to the chairs in /those/ aspects, through observation of those things. Observation informs me about the properties of those things (some of them are made of wood, some of metal, some of them have approximate dimensions and orientation of surfaces in common, etc.). The properties that I observe include both qualities and quantities, like cherrywood and dimensions, painted aluminium and number of legs, etc.

> "An example of wrong physics would be that glutamate behaves the way it does, because of its redness quality."

That's nothing to do with physics, that's to do with logic. Glutamate cannot have 'redness quality'. No molecule can, because we've already agreed that 'redness' refers to an experience. Molecules don't have nervous systems with which to experience things.

> "We simply need nature to tell us, through direct apprehension, which one is which, so we can have our grounded dictionary of the physical qualities of what we are objectively observing."

'Direct apprehension' means 'integration of information' (see above), so leaving the 'nature to tell us' bit out, assuming it's just poetic licence, er, I'm not sure now what the 'which is which' bit is referring to, but you're saying that we integrate various pieces of information in order to tell the difference between two different things.
Ok, I can buy that. I'd say that we match incoming integrated information to existing mental models of things, to identify them and distinguish between, say, a piece of cabbage and a piece of carrot.

> "so we can have our grounded dictionary of the physical qualities of what we are objectively observing."

As per the above, I'm going to assume that by 'physical qualities' you actually mean 'properties'. I don't see what "grounded dictionary of the properties that we are observing" might mean. I know what a dictionary is, but a 'grounded' dictionary? I understand that the word 'grounding' is used to imply some direct connection between something that occurs in a mind and something in the external world, somehow bypassing the extensive processing that our sensory signals undergo (ridiculous, I know, but it does suggest what you earlier called 'direct apprehension', which makes me now doubt that you really did mean what I concluded you mean by it (information integration)), but dictionaries define words by means of other words, so a 'grounded dictionary', even if the concept of 'grounding' was valid, makes no sense.

And finally:

> "And that kind of gestalt unification of qualities is a far more powerful computational mechanism than brute-force discrete logic gate binding of abstract binary numbers."

Integration of properties (that have been observed, presumably), is a more powerful type of computation than digital logic?

Ok, that is simply not true. It's also a false dichotomy.

Information is always abstract. Combining information with other information, whether it's numbers, properties, elements of properies (qualities or quantities), or anything else, it's still abstract. This means that computation, of whatever form, is abstract. What turns it into concrete actions is the context. A sequence of signals, whether they are signals coming from nerve impulses, voltages in wires, vibrations in string, variations in pressure, or anything else, only mean anything when they are expressed in a physical system that makes assumptions about their meaning. The same signal processed by a ribosome, a graphics program, and Broca's area in the brain will produce a protein, an image and a burst of speech, respectively. They are completely different things, but produced by the same signals, the same information. They can (and slmost certainly would) have different meanings, including none.

What you are trying to present as two different types of computation are in fact the same. Computation just means combining pieces of information in various ways according to various schemes (which are themselves more pieces of information, and can mean different things in different contexts. A computer program is information in memory, instructing a system how to process information in memory, which can include itself (self-modifying programs). A gene is a sequence of nucleic acids which can represent instructions for making a protein, or for modifying the behaviour of other genes, in direct or indirect ways. The perception of movement received by one eye of a fly can be combined with similar information from the other eye to become a set of instructions for flying a straight course, or avoiding a threat. The information from sensors in our blood vessels and digestive system can be combined with information from eyes, ears and skin to produce the instructions that make us get a frozen meal from the fridge, defrost and eat it, or chase and kill an antelope, or visit a restaurant). 

All of these things, all of the things we do and experience, are abstract information, processed in ways that produce various results in the real world, depending on the context in which they are used.


Phew.
That was a long and probably tedious attempt to translate what you actually mean, and half of it is probably wrong. Hopefully you can see my point. Most of what you say is very obscure /because of the bizarre language you use/. Please don't do this. Please try to say things plainly, using accepted meanings for words, or giving clear explanations when you feel it necessary to use words in a non-standard way, or to use uncommon terms.

This is the last time I will try to translate an entire post, you can probably see that it's very time-consuming and taxing. Please, in future posts, use plain language and clearly-defined terms, and avoid confusing, redundant words (like "knowledge of..") otherwise I simply won't bother to read it. Which is fair, because it means that you haven't bothered to read (or at least take notice of) this.

-- 
Ben