<div dir="ltr"><div dir="ltr"><br><div><br></div></div><br><div class="gmail_quote gmail_quote_container"><div dir="ltr" class="gmail_attr">On Tue, Jul 7, 2026 at 11:48 AM 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"><span>Can an external party, even in principle, know for sure what someone else is experiencing?</span></blockquote><div><br></div><div>I've talked about it before, but perhaps you haven't seen my discussions on neural ponytails?</div><div>You realize, right, that the left half of your brain knows what it is like for the right.</div><div>See our video on <a href="https://canonizer.com/videos/1-consciousness/10-Neural-Ponytails">Neuro Ponytails</a>.</div><div><br></div><div>And this document uses all the terminology you don't like, so I apologize, and am working on that with your help, but I believe there are <a href="https://docs.google.com/document/d/1JKwACeT3b1bta1M78wZ3H2vWkjGxwZ46OHSySYRWATs/edit?tab=t.0">3 different ways to eff the ineffable</a>.</div><div><br></div><div><br></div><div><br></div><div><br></div><div><br></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><span style="background-color:transparent">This is, I think, an important question that determines whether 'subjective' phenomena can be regarded as separate from 'objective' phenomena. Something that is objective is something that we can all verify and hopefully agree on, that we all have access to. Examples include the moon, the law of gravitation, 1+1=2, dead people don't talk, etc.</span></div><div><br></div><div><span>Subjective things are those that only one person, the person who experiences the subjective phenomenon, has access to. Examples include what it is like to be a bat, the experience of a specific shade of maroon, the sadness I feel when thinking of my dead cat (I really miss him, but don't expect anyone else to feel the same way).</span></div><div><br></div><div><span>As far as I'm aware, you can only guess, based on behaviour, what someone other than yourself is experiencing. There is no way to empirically determine that someone who says "I'm seeing in my mind's eye a blue cube" is actually experiencing a visualisation of a blue cube at all, let alone in the same way that you would. In fact, it's probably very unlikely. Consider the variety of internal experiences those words could indicate: different sizes of cube, seen from different directions, elevations, distances, different shades, intensities and brightnesses of blue, features or textures on the surface of the cube, degree of symmetry, sharpness or roundness of the edges and corners, blemishes, transparency, surface texture, sharpness of focus, degree of vividness of the experience, etc., etc., etc. One person might be visualising a shiny transparent sky-blue die in vivid sharp focus with bright reflections, and another person might be imagining something like a vague picture of a matt dark blue euclidean solid with no unevenness at all.<br><br></span></div><div><span>Even if you used a picture of a blue cube, and showed it to two people, they will still have different experiences. Different people notice different things and this affects the internal representation they form of anything they see, and people have differences in their eyes like astigmatism or cataracts, and so on and so on. Endless variation.</span></div><div><br></div><div><span>No brain scans, no dissection of the brain, no chemical test, nothing that we know of can verify what someone's experience is, we only have the word of the person who says it, and inference based on their behaviour, which is not proof, and is nowhere near detailed enough to be useful.</span></div><div><br></div><div><span>Even some advanced brain scanner that can reveal the exact pattern of neural firings in a specific brain region wouldn't help. Brains, while all based on the same general blueprint, differ considerably in their fine details. It's unlikely that any two individuals would have exactly the same physical network of neurons in any particular brain region, and even if they did, we have no way of actually knowing what it's like for them to experience what they describe as "seeing a blue cube". The same pattern of activation in the same arrangement of neurons and their connections (which is vanishingly improbable) could well result in a different experience. In fact, I'd be surprised if it didn't (although I can't prove that, of course. More subjectivity!).</span></div><div><br></div><div><span>What I'm saying is that there is absolutely NO WAY that one person can, without any uncertainty, know what another person is experiencing or has experienced in the past. We are all sealed vessels, with our own unique contents that is only accessible to ourselves. I don't expect that to ever change, even with the advent of uploading (what comes after uploading, though, is an open question, and may destroy my argument. Time will tell).</span></div><div><br></div><div><span>If anyone can think of a refutation to this view, please post it here. I'd be most interested in reading it (but please, PLEASE, use plain language! No Brentian 'knowledge of', 'fundamental/causal qualities' or 'wrong physics', please!).</span></div><div><br></div><div><span>---</span></div><span>Ben</span><br><div>
On Monday, 6 July 2026 at 23:57, Brent Allsop <<a href="mailto:brent.allsop@gmail.com" target="_blank">brent.allsop@gmail.com</a>> wrote:<br>
<blockquote type="cite">
<div dir="ltr"><br><div>Yes, Yes!</div><div>Except I'd call it Steven Lehar's theory, <span style="background-color:transparent">as he pretty much taught me all I know and he's the <a href="https://canonizer.com/topic/81-Mind-Experts/4-Steven-Lehar?" rel="noreferrer nofollow noopener" target="_blank">top peer-ranked expert on Canonizer</a>.</span></div><div><span style="background-color:transparent"><br></span></div><div></div><div><a href="https://www.amazon.com/World-Your-Head-Mechanism-Experience/dp/0415652790/ref=sr_1_1" rel="noreferrer nofollow noopener" target="_blank">https://www.amazon.com/World-Your-Head-Mechanism-Experience/dp/0415652790/ref=sr_1_1</a> </div><div><a href="https://qri.org/blog/steven-lehar-lineage#:~:text=Steven%20Lehar%20is%20many%20things,rational%20psychonauts%20of%20all%20times" rel="noreferrer nofollow noopener" target="_blank">https://qri.org/blog/steven-lehar-lineage#:~:text=Steven%20Lehar%20is%20many%20things,rational%20psychonauts%20of%20all%20times</a>.</div><div><br></div><div>And color is just the simplest and most straightforward set of qualities. Once we figure that out, the rest will fall into place using the same general principles.</div><div><br></div><div><br></div><div><br></div><div><br></div><div><br></div></div><br><div class="gmail_quote"><div dir="ltr" class="gmail_attr">On Mon, Jul 6, 2026 at 3:49 PM Ben Zaiboc via extropy-chat <<a href="mailto:extropy-chat@lists.extropy.org" rel="noreferrer nofollow noopener" target="_blank">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">On 06/07/2026 20:21, Brent wrote (with my additions in square brackets, to try to clarify the language):<br>
><br>
> To me this question reveals why you are so confused. The only thing that matters is the [quality of the knowledge = 'the experience'], which is black. Everything else is unrelated, or at best causally upstream from the [quality of this black knowledge = experience of black] rendered by our perception system.<br>
> You always focus on everything but what matters.<br>
><br>
> On Mon, Jul 6, 2026 at 6:27 AM John Clark via extropy-chat <<a href="mailto:extropy-chat@lists.extropy.org" rel="noreferrer nofollow noopener" target="_blank">extropy-chat@lists.extropy.org</a>> wrote:<br>
><br>
><br>
><br>
> On Mon, Jul 6, 2026 at 6:37 AM Ben Zaiboc via extropy-chat <<a href="mailto:extropy-chat@lists.extropy.org" rel="noreferrer nofollow noopener" target="_blank">extropy-chat@lists.extropy.org</a>> wrote:<br>
><br>
> A question for Brent:<br>
><br>
> These 'fundamental physical qualities' that you believe in, how do they relate to what I said about 'red' being a category of colours rather than an actual colour?<br>
><br>
> Do you think there's a different 'quality' for each of the thousands of different reds that we can see, or just one kind of 'essence of red' quality that applies to them all?<br>
><br>
><br>
> If something with the "red quality" is illuminated with blue light it will subjectively look black, does it still have the red quality or does it now have the black quality? <br>
><br>
> There are a relatively few "primary colors" which can be subjectively bound in infinitely many different ways.<br>
<br>
<br>
So the answer to John's question is "Black". Which tells us that it's the light entering our eyes that's the significant thing, not the physical properties of the strawberry or whatever object we're looking at.<br>
<br>
And the answer to my question is "Just one" (just one Red quality, etc.).<br>
<br>
Fine, so there's one Black quality that leads to the perception of Blackness, one White quality, one Red quality, one Blue quality, one Yellow quality, all of these are 'Primary Qualities', and colours like green, brown, grey, maroon, and even magenta can be explained by mixing together (which is what I presume 'subjectively bind' means) these different qualities in different combinations to produce the relevant experiences of different colours.<br>
<br>
Which means that there is no Green quality. All the green experiences we have are formed by combining a variety of the Blue and Yellow qualities, plus others as required. Similarly for purples, oranges, etc.<br>
<br>
And the Dark Red colour that I used previously must be a combination of the primary Red quality and the primary Black quality.<br>
<br>
I'm guessing that colour saturation (intensity) fits into this by varying the amount of White, and lightness by varying the amount of Black.<br>
<br>
So basically, our brains have a colour palette consisting of 'Spectrum' or 'Primary' colour qualities: Black, White, Red, Yellow, and Blue. This can produce all the millions of colours we can experience. Excellent.<br>
<br>
And this also means that each of these 'qualities' must have some mechanism to control the amounts of each that are mixed together to produce any specific colour experience. Each Quality must also have a Quantity.<br>
<br>
Good, that simplifies things considerably, and we only need five mysterious substances that embody these five Qualities, plus a way to control the 'dosage' of each, and some kind of recipe that controls which qualities are used in what amounts for each different colour experience we are having. And some way to create these recipes for each specific spot in our visual field and transmit them to the relevant areas in our brains at sufficient speed for it all to work seamlessly and in real-time.<br>
<br>
Exactly how these five substances do their thing (and what that thing actually is) is presumably still a mystery, but at least we have some clarification of what Brent is talking about.<br>
<br>
So now that we've tidied up Brent's theory of colour vision (or at least expressed it in comprehensible terms, and laid out some necessary conditions for it to work), what about the varied and many other kinds of subjective experiences we can have?<br>
<br>
If Brent's theory is to have any legs at all, it must be extendable to all our experiences. I'm not sure how to do that, but it can wait for another thread, I think.<br>
<br>
-- <br>
Ben<br>
<br>
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