[ExI] Subjective/Objective

[Ben Zaiboc]

On 13/07/2026 02:23, Brent Allsop wrote:
> I guess this is yet another point where we just disagree.


Apparently so.

But I'd like to point out that the "we" in question is not you and me. 
It's not a matter of 'two equally valid but opposing opinions'.

It's you and the entire scientific establishment. In particular, you and the cumulative body of knowledge about how brains work, that the human race has built up over the last couple of hundred years.

I've said before that it's not me you're arguing with. It's not me that has done a couple of centuries worth of neurological research that you're simply dismissing. I just learned this stuff in the last handful of decades, and as far as I can see, it all makes good sense, and ties in with what I've learned about how the world works in general. It's also practical knowledge that actually gives us the ability to do things we couldn't otherwise do (science is great, really. It has the huge advantage that it actually works!).

There's a saying, "extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence". Your claims are definitely extraordinary, but you've not given a single shred of evidence to support them. Neurology, on the other hand, has tons of it.

It might be worth pointing out that it's not just biology that you're clashing with, it's physics and information science as well. Not to mention logic.


> Cause-and-effect-based messaging, 


What other kind of messaging is there? Have you discovered a new kind? Get ready to receive your Nobel prize in physics!


> and words are, by design, abstracted away from whatever physical properties are representing them.  A transducing dictionary is required to know the meaning.


By design? I can't think what this might mean. Surely you're not suggesting a designer? Messages are abstract. That's just a fact. Here is a message: $""%*^^£!£$^&&***&^^^^?><.

You don't know what it means. It's an abstract sequence of symbols. But, in the right context, it does have a meaning. In a different context, it might have a different meaning. /Messages, on their own (without context), never have a meaning/. That applies to all messages, no matter how they are transmitted or what they consist of. Shannon has a lot to say about the information content of a message, but nothing about what the information means, for a good reason. The answer to "What does this information mean?" is "It depends".

So when you say "messages ... are ... abstracted away from whatever physical properties are representing them" (I think you mean "whatever physical properties they are representing"), this is always, and necessarily, true.

If a message originates in a system that creates it to represent a specific thing, like a propery of a physical thing (e.g. the intensity of an impact on a specific area of skin), that message, if taken on its own, has no meaning at all. It's completely abstract, and carries no 'quality' (or in this case, quantity) that can be interpreted without a context. If that signal is a spike train in a nerve fibre going to a specific spinal ganglion (and then on to the appropriate area of the brain), it's the specifics of which fibre, which ganglion and which area of the brain that gives the signal its meaning. If someone records the signal from the axon it's travelling along, without also recording which axon, the signal cannot be interpreted as being about a thump on the leg.

If you show a neurologist a recording of a signal taken from an axon, and ask them what it means, the first question they'll ask is "Which axon?". Nobody, looking at such a signal in isolation, would be able to say "Oh yes, that comes from a punch on the nose. It's saying how much it hurts".

In the same way, if a signal travelling along one of the axons from the eye is recorded, and we don't know which axon, then we don't, and can't, know what it means. It could equally signify the colour of a spot in the visual field corresponding to somewhere on the left edge of a strawberry, the fact that a spindle in a specific muscle controlling the orientation of the eyeball has fired (indicating stretching of the muscle, thus movement of the eyeball in a certain direction), intensity of light striking a particular rod cell in the retina, or any one of thousands of other pieces of information relating to the eye. The specific form of the signal (the number and timing of the spikes that make up the signal) might, if we know enough, tell us something like "This is a strong signal", "This is a weak signal", "Starts weak then gets stronger over 0.25s", etc., but that is of very limited use, and even that does depend on knowing something about how the signals are encoded.

So, if I understand what you're saying, 'dictionaries' (ways of interpreting what a signal signifies, in a specific context) are absolutely essential. Although, what that means in practice, is that 'this pattern of signals coming in on these axons' means 'fire these other neurons in that other pattern'. At the level of neural circuits, that's what's happening. Any meaning to these events only emerges at higher levels, that we might call "ouch, hand jerks away from flame", "Hot things hurt", "Keep away from the brightest part of the candle", etc.

The significant thing here is that /at no point/ do any physical properties get transmitted through the nervous system. Only signals /about/ those properties, when appropriately interpreted in the correct context.
Ok, that's not strictly true. Physical properties are transmitted through the nervous system all the time, but they are things like ion concentrations, they are the same type of phenomena all over the brain, and are not indicative of what kind of physical property started the process.

In your terms, the 'red quality' coming in on a specific nerve fibre could easily become a 'loud honk' quality if the fibre connects to the wrong place (this is not a fanciful example. It's exactly what happens in synaesthesia).


> If that is all you have, then John would be right: there is no way to eff the ineffable, even for elemental qualities, because messages that require dictionaries, alone, can't do it.

OK, then, that seems about right. Whatever it actually means.

>
> When we are aware of many qualities at one time as one unified gestalt experience, something more is happening — effing of the ineffable.


Nope, nothing more is happening. When we become aware of something, when many signals are happening at the same time and influencing each other, that is what is happening - we become aware of it. I don't know what else could be happening. Isn't it remarkable enough?

Can I ask that you actually define the words 'ineffable' and 'eff', and explain what you think the phrase means? Do you think 'possing the impossible' means something? It would seem to imply something other than proving that something thought to be impossible is possible after all. What the Wright brothers did, for example.

In my simplistic fashion, I imagine that 'effing the ineffable' would mean proving that something unknowable is actually not. In other words, finding something out. But I'm fairly sure that you mean something else (otherwise why use such bizarre terminology?), I just don't know what.


>
> You don't like my prefered term "subjective binding" so I'll use 'information integration".  If a new quality you have never experienced before, call it grue, was integrated with your familiar qualities, you would be able to say for the first time:
>
>     "Oh THAT is what grue is like."
>
> It is a tautology that any kind of abstract messaging, like the word 'grue' alone, would not give you that ability.
>


You're basically saying that it's not possible to have new experiences if messages are abstract.

All I can say is that we can prove beyond doubt that messages /are/ abstract, and that I know I often have new experiences.

-- 
Ben