[ExI] consciousness and perception

[brent.allsop at comcast.net]

 -------------- Original message ----------------------
From: "John K Clark" <jonkc at bellsouth.net>
> On January 25, 2009 "Brent Allsop" <brent.allsop at comcast.net> Wrote:
> 
> "This theory predicts that the apple, the sodium chloride, or anything like
> that has no phenomenal qualities that we know of."
> 
> On January 24, 2009 "Brent Allsop" <brent.allsop at comcast.net> Wrote:
> 
> "This theory simply predicts that in addition to these behavioral
> properties, something about atoms also has phenomenal qualities like
> red, green, the taste of salt."
> 
> I'll say one thing for you Brent, sometime in the last 2 days you were
> right. 

You're just pulling my leg right?  You always seem to manage to miss some important piece of the puzzle.  And you are repeatedly doing this on purpose I bet.

These two were obviously said in different contexts.

The first one was talking about things up stream from our senses - or the initial causes of perception process - outside of our skull.

The second one was talking about the final result of the perception process - our knowledge of what we are perceiving.  Whatever it is in our brain that our knowledge is constructed of, does have phenomenal properties.  We just don't know what the neural correlate is that has them yet.  All this is inside of our skull.

Sodium Chloride, upstream from our senses, starts the perception process.  The final result is, something with our taste of salt, representing the cause and effect behavior of salt our taste buds are causally detecting.  Likely, some people use something with a different phenomenal quality to represent sodium chloride - in other words, salt tastes different for them.

All we know, phenomenally, is that something in our brain has our taste of salt, that is representing the sodium chloride that is coming in contact with our taste buds.  We have no idea, whether or not sodium chloride itself has anything to do with any phenomenal properties.  All we know about it is it's cause and effect behaviors - how it causes our taste buds to fire.  Our brain abstractly represents this cause and effect behavior with something that has our taste of salt - all in our brain - not in our mouth.

All this is why, in Steve's Image on this page:

http://canonizer.com/topic.asp/88/6

There is no color outside of the skull, and all the color is inside of the skull.

At least, all this is what the theory predicts.

So, now I bet you'll say something like there is no salt in the brain or some other silly thing right?  lots of laughs.  You're such a joker.

Brent Allsop