[ExI] How the brain builds sentences, neuron by neuron

[Ben Zaiboc]

On 26/06/2026 15:46, Brent Allsop wrote:
> I know this is the popular consensus - functionalism.


I hesitate to comment on that, because I know that you have the same attitude to language as Humpty Dumpty in Alice in Wonderland. I don't think anybody has yet deciphered what you want the word 'quality' to mean, for example.


>
> I constantly admit my minority camp, materialism, can be falsified, for me, if you simply tell me how you can demostrate getting a redness quality from an "ON and OFF" that isn't laughable (without a dictionary).
>
> The reason it is laughable, is that you're thinking about it in the wrong way.  "ON and OFF" are abstract notions, or labels of particular physical states, requiring dictionaries to get from one to the other.
> (i.e. does a hole in a tape equal ON or OFF?)


All I can say here is that the Brent Allsopian way of thinking is at odds with what observation and logical deduction tell us about how the world (and the human brain) works.

ON and OFF are indeed abstract notions, but that doesn't mean they are useless. Morse code, for example, works extremely well. It doesn't matter whether a hole in a tape means ON or OFF, as long as all systems that interact with the tape are consistent, it works. It doesn't matter whether the codon AAC means asparagine or guanidine, as long as all your cells are consistent in their interpretation, you build all your proteins correctly. The sequence of nucleotides Adenine-Adenine-Cytosine has no 'quality' that relates to any particular amino acid, it's just an abstract code, expressed as specific molecules. Living cells happen to be able to interpret that code and turn it into something completely different, a string of particular amino acids.

At the risk of sounding just as arrogant, I could say that YOU are the one thinking about things in the wrong way. There's nothing wrong with abstract notions, they aren't tied to material properties except by some convention, and they don't need to be. This is how information works. It's abstract, and has to be interpreted. As long as the things doing the interpreting agree, then they can work together and get things done, guided by the abstract, non-material, 'qualityless' information embodied in things such as holes in paper, neural spikes in nerve axons, electrical charges in a wire, pressure waves in air, etc.


>
> It is a brute physical fact that some strawberries are 'red' (because they reflect light in a particular way).


This statement is at the very least a conflation of the properties of reflected light and the sensation of colour happening in a mind. It should have occurred to you by now that these are two /completely different things/, only related by a long sequence of combinations and transformations of a lot of information, some of which comes from certain different types of light detecting cells in the eyes. This confusion is a bit like saying that "emails are IN FACT beaches". Yes, silicon is a factor in both of them (at least with our current technology) but it's a lot more complicated than that.

Anybody who doesn't realise and accept this, needs to learn a lot more biology, particularly neurology. If you want to have an opinion on a subject, and expect people to listen to you, you should at least know something about that subject.

Strawberries are not, in fact, red.

An entire book could be written with the title 'Strawberries are not Red', explaining what 'colour', as perceived by the brain, actually is, and why and how it differs from, and is related to, wavelengths of light, brightness levels, and a bunch of other things. I'm not exaggerating. In fact, I'd be surprised if there weren't books that deal with this topic already. It's a long time since I was a biology student, and we certainly know more now than we did then about colour vision.


> It also must be a physical fact that something in the brain behaves as it does because of its subjective quality.


I can't say for certain that nobody else knows what you mean by this, but I certainly don't. That collection of words contains no actual meaning that I can see. If you want to talk about how brains behave, you need to know some neuroscience, and put your statements in terms that make sense in that discipline.

If, on the other hand, you want to claim that neuroscience has got it all wrong, well, good luck with that. You have a long, long road ahead!

-- 
Ben