[ExI] Red

[John Clark]

On Mon, Jul 6, 2026 at 9:02 PM Brent Allsop <brent.allsop at gmail.com> wrote:

*>>> You can't answer the many 'hard' and contradictory questions like this
>>> in the functionalist model. *
>>
>>
> *>> Name one! *
>
>
> *> The issue you brought up right here.  To a functionalist, the
> strawberry is 'red', the light is 'red' the image on the reina is 'red' -
> everything is red.  But when you introduce inversion, red, blue, and black
> like this you don't know what to do*.



*If as a prank God decided to place a blue filter over the sun every time I
got near a strawberry then I'd have insufficient knowledge to realize it
might not look black in other lighting conditions; UNLESS I knew some
chemistry and enough quantum mechanics to make a calculation and realize
that there was a chemical in the strawberry that would absorbe blue light
and reflect red light. This would:*

*1) Enable me to provide an explanation for why a strawberry always looked
black to me. *

*2) Enable me to make a prediction that if the strawberry was illuminated
by the unfiltered white line of the Sun then the strawberry would look red
to me. But of course I'd still have no way of knowing what the strawberry
looked like to you, although I could determine from your actions that your
red qualia must look different to you from your black qualia and your blue
qualia.*

*> You can deal with it using dictionaries though - as is required for all
> substrate independence.*


*If you don't believe in substrate independence then you don't believe that
consciousness, including consciousness of the way that colors look, is just
the way that data subjectively feels when it is being processed
intelligently, then you must believe that some other thing is doing it.
Occam's Razor says that the simplest explanation that explains the facts is
the best, so it would be legitimate for me to ask you how that hypothetical
"something" of yours is able to generate subjective states such as color
qualia. However it would not be legitimate to ask me the same question
because nothing can be simpler then on to off, or off to on.  *


*> And have you ever heard of the neural
> <https://canonizer.com/topic/79-Neural-Substitution-Argument/1-Agreement?>substitutuion
> issue
> <https://canonizer.com/topic/79-Neural-Substitution-Argument/1-Agreement?>, *


*Of course I have! If I hadn't I wouldn't have paid $80,000 to have my
brain frozen when I die. I don't give a shit what happens to the rest of my
body because if I am lucky enough to survive, and I don't think my chances
are very good but they're better than zero, it certainly won't be as a
biological being. Mr. Jupiter Brain won't want me messing around in the
same reality level that his information processing devices are in. I don't
blame Mr. JB, if I needed brain surgery I wouldn't want a monkey running
around the operating room either. *

*> to name another conundrum functionalists think is not a fallacy?*


*The conclusion is "such simulations result in consciousness since the
behavior is indistinguishable from the original". OK so where is the
"conundrum" in that? Where is the "fallacy "?*

*John K Clark*
3z]







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>>> On Mon, Jul 6, 2026 at 10:45 AM John Clark <johnkclark at gmail.com> wrote:
>>>
>>>> On Mon, Jul 6, 2026 at 11:44 AM Brent Allsop via extropy-chat <
>>>> extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote:
>>>>
>>>> *> To me this question reveals why you are so confused.  The only thing
>>>>> that matters is the quality of the knowledge, which is black.  Everything
>>>>> else is unrelated, or at best causally upstream from the quality of this
>>>>> black knowledge rendered by our perception system.*
>>>>>
>>>>
>>>> *That's all very nice but you haven't answered my question, I will
>>>> repeat it.  If something with the "red quality" is illuminated with blue
>>>> light it will subjectively look black, does it still have the red quality
>>>> or does it now have the black quality? *
>>>>
>>>> *> You always focus on everything but what matters.*
>>>>
>>>>
>>>> *You are the one who introduced the idea that ripe tomatoes have a "red
>>>> quality" , not me. All I want to know is, do those ripe tomatoes still have
>>>> the "red quality" if they are being illuminated with blue light? The
>>>> question is clear and could be answered with a simple yes or no. *
>>>>
>>>> * John K Clark*
>>>>
>>>>
>>>>>
>>>>>
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