<div dir="ltr"><div><br></div><div>Hi Ben,</div><div><br></div><div>When you look at an image like this:</div><div><img src="cid:ii_mr9u9ts30" alt="bent_pencil.png" width="250" height="141"></div><div>You can doubt the pencil is bent, you can doubt the pencil is really yellow, and you can doubt the pencil even exists.</div><div><br></div><div>But you can't doubt that your knowledge of the pencil exists, you can't doubt your knowledge of the pencil is bent, nor can you doubt that your knowledge of the pencil has your yellowness quality.</div><div><br></div><div>You experience the yellowness of your knowledge of the pencil and the orangeness of the eraser as one unified 'gestalt' experience. You can't achieve that via seperate channels/pixels. Some kind of direct apprehension or unification of qualities is required.</div><div><br></div><div>And by "wrong physics," we must remember that subjective qualities must have causal properties we can objectively observe. It's just that cause and effect observation doesn't tell you what they are like. A<span style="background-color:transparent">n example of wrong physics would be that glutamate behaves the way it does, because of its redness quality. But that may be the wrong set of physics. It might be glycine, that has the redness quality. Glutamate might have your grenness quality. We simply need nature to tell us, through direct apprehension, which one is which, so we can </span>have our grounded<span style="background-color:transparent"> dictionary of the physical qualities of what we are objectively observing.</span></div><div><br></div><div>And that kind of gestalt unification of qualities is a far more powerful computational mechanism than brute-force discrete logic gate binding of abstract binary numbers.</div><div><br></div><div><br></div></div><br><div class="gmail_quote gmail_quote_container"><div dir="ltr" class="gmail_attr">On Mon, Jul 6, 2026 at 5:08 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>On 06/07/2026 20:21, Brent Allsop wrote:</div><blockquote type="cite"><br>
<div><div dir="ltr">On Mon, Jul 6, 2026 at 8:01 AM Ben Zaiboc via extropy-chat <<a href="mailto:extropy-chat@lists.extropy.org" target="_blank">extropy-chat@lists.extropy.org</a>> wrote:<br></div><blockquote style="margin:0px 0px 0px 0.8ex;border-left:1px solid rgb(204,204,204);padding-left:1ex">Brent,<br><br>
Your claims seem to me so extraordinary and so completely outside what I
know about how brains work (and what science has taught us about things
in general), that I thought it might be a good idea to confirm that you
are in fact saying what it seems to me that you're saying.<br><br>
One problem I have is that your language is so obscure and elaborate
that I have difficulty telling if I have in fact understood you or not.<br><br>
So, let me know which of the following I've got right and wrong, about what you are claiming:<br><br>
* Certain material substances (presently unknown) possess properties
that can be called 'phenomenal qualities' (which means the feeling of
being something, or what it is like to be or experience something).<br><br>
* These properties are /fundamental/ properties, i.e. low-level physical
properties, on a par with electromagnetism, gravity, the strong and
weak nuclear forces, etc.<br></blockquote><div><br></div><div>Yes, but...</div><div>Phenomenal
properties of physics have objectively observable causal properties,
but describing or naming these causal properties doesn't tell you what
they are like, without a dictionary.</div></div></blockquote><div style="font-family:Arial,sans-serif;font-size:14px;color:rgb(0,0,0);background-color:rgb(255,255,255)"><br><br></div>
I don't understand what you are saying here. "phenomenal properties of
physics" just means "physics", no? If not, please explain the
difference.<br><br>
"objectively observable causal properties" = observable properties =
properties (if there are any unobservable properties, we won't know what
they are).<br><br>
So, physics has properties. Not sure what you are getting at by this,
but we have discovered certain physical laws, so I'll go with that.<br><br>
Describing or naming them doesn't tell you what they are like, without a
dictionary. (what they are like?? You mean what they are?)<br><br>
Ok, so look things up in a dictionary. It will explain what the laws of
thermodynamics are, for example, what Boyle's law is, etc. <br><div style="font-family:Arial,sans-serif;font-size:14px;color:rgb(0,0,0);background-color:rgb(255,255,255)"><br><br></div><blockquote type="cite">
<div><div>We are already
objectively detecting and describing these causal properties; i.e. they
are a subset of all the fundamental causal properties we know. We just
don't know which causal properties are for which qualities.</div></div></blockquote><br><br>
We detect and describe properties of things, ok (I don't see the relevance of the word 'causal').<br>
"We don't know which properties are for which qualities". Hm, this is a
bit ambiguous. Properties include qualities and quantities, so you'll
have to explain this.<br>
Give an example of what you mean here.<br><br><br><blockquote type="cite">
<div><div>It's just that describing or naming them (like the word 'red') doesn't tell you what they are like, without a dictionary.</div><div><span>It's like is 700 nm light red or green? You can't know without a dictionary.</span></div></div></blockquote><div style="font-family:Arial,sans-serif;font-size:14px;color:rgb(0,0,0);background-color:rgb(255,255,255)"><br><br></div>
Or you could use the internet: "<span>700 nm light is red.</span> It is at the longer wavelength end of the visible light spectrum".<br>
So now you know.<br><div style="font-family:Arial,sans-serif;font-size:14px;color:rgb(0,0,0);background-color:rgb(255,255,255)"><br><br></div><blockquote type="cite">
<div><div>We say the
strawberry reflects red light because of its red property. It's like
that, only the reflection of light is the wrong set of physics, as we
know redness is a property of something in the brain - not the
strawberry.</div></div></blockquote><div style="font-family:Arial,sans-serif;font-size:14px;color:rgb(0,0,0);background-color:rgb(255,255,255)"><br><br></div>
There's no such thing as 'the wrong set of physics'. Physics may not
currently have everything right, but there's only one set of physics. It
develops over time as we learn more.<br><br>
To say that "redness is a property of something in the brain - not the
strawberry" is missing the point. Redness is perceived in the brain
/because/ the strawberry is red. If strawberries were yellow, we'd
perceive yellowness. It's a chain of events. Light hits the strawberry,
it absorbs some wavelengths of light and reflects the rest. Our eyes
receive the reflected light. Signals from the retina (and other places)
produce the sensation of 'strawberry red'. This all happens acccording
to the same set of physics - the only one we have.<br><div style="font-family:Arial,sans-serif;font-size:14px;color:rgb(0,0,0);background-color:rgb(255,255,255)"><br><br></div><blockquote type="cite">
<div><div>Something in the brain has the redness property, not the strawberry.</div><div>Neurons can do subjective binding of these objectively observable properties, enabling us to directly apprehend them.</div></div></blockquote><div style="font-family:Arial,sans-serif;font-size:14px;color:rgb(0,0,0);background-color:rgb(255,255,255)"><br><br></div>
You'll have to explain what you mean by 'subjective binding'.<br><div style="font-family:Arial,sans-serif;font-size:14px;color:rgb(0,0,0);background-color:rgb(255,255,255)"><br><br></div><blockquote type="cite">
<div><div>Cause and effect
observation is always different sets of causally downstream properties -
representing different things. You always need a dictionary to get
back to the original. Because of this, objective observation can be mistaken.</div></div></blockquote><div style="font-family:Arial,sans-serif;font-size:14px;color:rgb(0,0,0);background-color:rgb(255,255,255)"><br><br></div>
I don't understand what you mean by this.<br><br><br><blockquote type="cite">
<div><div>Direct apprehension is infallible, the same idea as "I think, therefore I am."</div></div></blockquote><div style="font-family:Arial,sans-serif;font-size:14px;color:rgb(0,0,0);background-color:rgb(255,255,255)"><br><br></div>
What on earth is 'direct apprehension'? I'm pretty sure that we don't
'directly' apprehend anything. I don't even know what mechanism could
exist to enable that. Everything that we experience in our minds gets
there via an indirect route. Often extremely indirect, to the extent
that it makes sense to say that we make up most of what we experience,
extrapolated from some pretty sparse information from the environment,
coming in to our sensory apparatus and transformed many times into
different forms (e.g., we have many different visual maps in the brain,
that take information from the eyes and transform it, many times, into
what we actually experience as sight:
<a href="https://web.stanford.edu/~bobd/cgi-bin/pubs/pdfs/Wandell_VisualClusters_RSTB05.pdf" target="_blank">https://web.stanford.edu/~bobd/cgi-bin/pubs/pdfs/Wandell_VisualClusters_RSTB05.pdf</a>)
. And what we experience is very fallible, as can be seen by the many
illusions we can fall victim to.
<pre cols="72">--
Ben</pre>_______________________________________________<br>
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