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<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align:left" align="left"><span style="font-size:12pt;font-family:"Times New Roman",serif">Hi John,</span></p>

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<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align:left" align="left"><span style="font-size:12pt;font-family:"Times New Roman",serif">Thanks for bringing this up.<span style>  </span>It is good to know that at least someone is
making a good effort to try to understand this stuff.</span></p>

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<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align:left" align="left"><span style="font-size:12pt;font-family:"Times New Roman",serif">In my opinion, you are missing what
it means to detect, and not abstracting your model in a way to enable the
understanding of detection of anything.</span></p>

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<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align:left" align="left"><span style="font-size:12pt;font-family:"Times New Roman",serif">To illustrate, let’s talk about
detecting the property of “causal red”, which is defined to be the ability of
something to reflect 650 NM light.<span style>  </span>So
the question is, what does it mean to detect this, as apposed to detecting a
green leaf?</span></p>

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<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align:left" align="left"><span style="font-size:12pt;font-family:"Times New Roman",serif">You could abstract this detection
process in a way that says it was the DNA, in the seed, that put all the sugars
and everything together, in the right way, and that in this way, it was DNA,
that was the initial cause.<span style>  </span>But of
course, with that improperly simplified model, you would not be understanding
how the detection of the casual red property, vs detecting the green leaves,
works.<span style>  </span>And if you take this logic
further, even the DNA isn’t the initial cause…<span style> 
</span>You are just picking an arbitrary point in the causal chain, when you
pick 650 NM light like that, which has nothing to do with what you are trying
to “detect”.</span></p>

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<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align:left" align="left"><span style="font-size:12pt;font-family:"Times New Roman",serif">Brent Allsop</span></p>

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</div><div class="gmail_extra"><br><div class="gmail_quote">On Tue, Jan 27, 2015 at 9:04 PM, John Clark <span dir="ltr"><<a href="mailto:johnkclark@gmail.com" target="_blank">johnkclark@gmail.com</a>></span> wrote:<br><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0 0 0 .8ex;border-left:1px #ccc solid;padding-left:1ex"><div dir="ltr">Brent, in your simplified hypothetical you say that in the perception process the<br>neurotransmitter Glutamate behaves the way it does because of its REDNESS quality. But that can't be right, not even theoretically. There may be a long causal chain between the two but Glutamate would behave the way it does because of electromagnetic radiation with a wavelength of 650nm; that's what powered the molecule to do whatever its does not REDNESS. <br><br>  John K Clark <div><br></div><div><br></div></div>
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