<div dir="ltr"><div dir="ltr"><br><div>Hi Ben,</div></div><br><div class="gmail_quote"><div dir="ltr" class="gmail_attr">On Fri, Jan 31, 2020 at 12:36 PM Ben Zaiboc via extropy-chat <<a href="mailto:extropy-chat@lists.extropy.org">extropy-chat@lists.extropy.org</a>> wrote:<br></div><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0px 0px 0px 0.8ex;border-left:1px solid rgb(204,204,204);padding-left:1ex">
<div bgcolor="#FFFFFF">
Brent Allsop wrote:<br>
<br>
<cite>>One of the important fundamentals is that knowledge of
reality is different than reality. Knowledge of reality is
simplified and optimized so we can survive more efficiently. It
only focuses on and models what is important to us. Qualia
blindness is simply having a model of reality that does not
include qualia. If there is only one word being used for all
things red, that is qualia blind language.</cite><cite><br>
</cite><br>
Ah, so you're just talking about the models of the world we create
in our heads being a different thing to the 'real' world outside. I
suppose there must be people who don't think about that, but they
will be the people who aren't interested in such things. Surely
everyone who has any interest in how our minds work realises this?<br>
<br>
You're saying that it's important to use language that distinguishes
between 'reality' (the world outside our heads) and our internal
models of it. OK, fair enough, so I'm not qualia-blind after all,
and never have been, since I started thinking about such things, a
long time ago. I probably was before that.<br></div></blockquote><div><br></div><div>Right, much of our problems are just communication issues, I think.</div><div><br></div><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0px 0px 0px 0.8ex;border-left:1px solid rgb(204,204,204);padding-left:1ex"><div bgcolor="#FFFFFF"><cite>>All experimentalists, today, only use one word for all
things red. If they detect any physical differences in the brains
of people percieving red, they "correct" for this only thinking of
all of it as red. </cite><cite><br>
</cite><br>
Well, I can't speak for "all experimentalists, today", but I doubt
if they fail to understand the difference between the red light
entering the eye, and the internal representation of whatever red
thing is seen, including the abstract mental category 'redness'. In
fact, I can't see how they could fail to. Are you sure you
understand <i>them</i>? I don't really see how anyone who studies
the brain can really think of the representations of sensory
information as being <i>the same thing</i> as the external signals
that drives them. That would imply they think there is red light
inside the brain, everytime that brain thinks about red light. I'm
certain nobody seriously thinks that.<br></div></blockquote><div><br></div><div>I challenge you to find (I've been searching for some time) any peer reviewed journal article on perception, which uses more than one word for all things "red". I haven't managed to find one, yet.</div><div><br></div><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0px 0px 0px 0.8ex;border-left:1px solid rgb(204,204,204);padding-left:1ex"><div bgcolor="#FFFFFF"><cite>>And that is the only reason, today, nobody can tell is the
colour of anything.</cite><cite><br>
</cite><br>
I don't follow that. What do you mean by "nobody can tell the colour
of anything"?<br></div></blockquote><div><br></div><div>When we look out at the world, we see a very colorful world. But as we've been talking about, none of those colors are properties of the world out there. And my redness could be like your greeness, so whos red? Those colors are a property of something, maybe some kind of process as you say, in our brain. But nobody can tell us which of all our descriptions of stuff in the brain, is a description of redness. As it indicates in both of the images in "<a href="https://canonizer.com/topic/88-Representational-Qualia/6#statement">Representational Qualia Theory</a>" everything out side of the head is in black and white. This is because all objective information is abstract, devoid of any color information. The only thing of any color, is the color of our knowledge of the world.</div><div><br></div><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0px 0px 0px 0.8ex;border-left:1px solid rgb(204,204,204);padding-left:1ex"><div bgcolor="#FFFFFF"><cite>>And that is the only reason people think there is a hard
mind body problem</cite><cite><br>
</cite><br>
Personally, I never thought the 'hard problem of consciousness' made
any sense, if that's what you're referring to. But what has it got
to do with what you're talking about?<br></div></blockquote><div><br></div><div>Right.</div><div> </div><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0px 0px 0px 0.8ex;border-left:1px solid rgb(204,204,204);padding-left:1ex"><div bgcolor="#FFFFFF">OK, tell you what, never mind.<br>
<br>
I've just read your exchanges with Stathis, and you seem to be
telling him different things to what you're telling me.<br>
Does he understand, as you told me, that all this is a
thought-experiment in a totally unrealistic, simplified made-up
world?<br>
Because, you know, that's important! I thought, all this time, you
were talking about one aspect of the real world, and when you said
it's not, it made more sense. A bit more sense.<br>
<br>
But it seems clear that you still think there is such a 'thing in
itself' as redness, even though you seem to accept that redness is a
representation in the mind of something seen by the eyes. You seem
incapable of understanding that this representation can be different
in different minds and at different times, but still have the same
meaning (e.g. 'redness').<br></div></blockquote><div><br></div><div>Redness must be a quality of some set of physics. We think it is a quality of the strawberry, but it's not. It's a quality of our knowledge of the strawberry. Of all our objective descriptions of stuff in the brain, one of those is a description of redness.</div><div> </div><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0px 0px 0px 0.8ex;border-left:1px solid rgb(204,204,204);padding-left:1ex"><div bgcolor="#FFFFFF">I can experience redness, but there is no such 'thing' as redness.<br></div></blockquote><div> </div><div>I would disagree with this. There must be something physical (even if some kind of process) which is what we directly experience as a single pixel of redness. And all of our pixels of colorness must be able to be computationally bound together into a composite qualitative experience of a strawberry, and such. Certainly you would agree that you could objectively observe, and fully describe, whatever this "process" is, and be able to objectively describe a change to this process, which we experienced as redness? </div><div><br></div><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0px 0px 0px 0.8ex;border-left:1px solid rgb(204,204,204);padding-left:1ex"><div bgcolor="#FFFFFF">
In other words, redness is an experience, a process, not a thing in
its own right, independent of the brain that creates it.</div></blockquote><div><br></div><div>This sounds like the popular consensus, that redness "arises" from some process. The problem is, I bet you can't give any actual objective falsifiable description of what kind of process would have a redness qulia, for a single pixel, and how this process, for this single pixel would change, when it changed to greenness.</div><div><br></div><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0px 0px 0px 0.8ex;border-left:1px solid rgb(204,204,204);padding-left:1ex"><div bgcolor="#FFFFFF">I think this is where we differ most. You think that 'redness' is a
thing that has an existence independent of a mind. Am I right?<br></div></blockquote><div><br></div><div>Objective descriptions of stuff in the brain provide no information about the color they are describing. Al I"m saying is one of those descriptions, even if it is some kind of process, that is what we directly experience as redness. If you could provide a description of a kind of process, from which a redness quality would arize, I'd be happy to substitute that for 'glutamate' as an easily falsifiable candidate for what we directly experience as redness.</div><div><br></div><div><br></div><div><br></div><div><br></div></div></div>