[extropy-chat] Qualia Bet

[gts]

On Tue, 27 Dec 2005 00:20:06 -0500, Brandon Reinhart  
<transcend at extropica.com> wrote:

> Hmm. Would it help to talk about qualia that are not related to objects?

Yes.

In other words, you are wondering how to explain mistaken color perception  
and hallucination if color is a Lockean primary quality intrinsic in or  
"on the surface of" objects.

This author claims to have an answer:

"If perception is direct, it is asked, how can it possibly even be  
occasionally mistaken, let alone systematically misleading (as it seems to  
be, for instance, in the case of metameric colors)? Clearly we do often  
misperceive things. Hallucination is perhaps the most worrying example of  
this. Since, by definition, there is no stimulus in the real environment  
to which it corresponds, how could it possibly be explained except in  
terms of the presence of aberrant mental representations? I would like to  
think that the materials for an answer to this (and related problems) may  
lie in the "active perception" based theory of mental imagery that I have  
recently proposed (Thomas, 1999). Hallucination is, very arguably, merely  
mental imagery that we somehow fail to distinguish from veridical  
perception, and if imagery can be explained without appealing to mediating  
representations (as I think I have shown) then hallucination (and other  
sorts of non-veridical perceptual experience) can too."

http://www.calstatela.edu/faculty/nthomas/col-real.htm

I'm intrigued by the idea of the 'extended mind' in this same article:

"On this view, the mind is there in the world (Clark, 1997) rather than  
being a spectator locked away in the skull, merely reflecting the world in  
its representations. Clark & Chalmers (1998) even go so far to speak about  
an "extended mind", the boundaries of the self, as a cognitive system,  
extending beyond the skull and the skin to encompass the things with which  
we interact. Taking this literally, it would even make sense to say that  
color experiences exist in the mind after all, but as qualities of the  
surfaces of the objects around us, rather than as mysterious qualia inside  
the brain."

-gts