[ExI] Fwd: Paper on "Detecting Qualia" presentation at 2015 MTA conference

[John Clark]

On Sat, Jan 31, 2015  Brent Allsop <brent.allsop at canonizer.com> wrote:


> > Oh Great!  He believes the idea of a redness quality is reasonable, and
> now he is going to tell me what he believes redness to be.
>

REDNESS is a qualia just like every sensation, it is a label that gains
it's subjective  meaning only from it's association with other things that
have the same label.


> > the focus about what is reasonable to believe about REDNESS, suddenly
> switching to the causal, and zombie red?
>

It's still not clear to me what "zombie red" means.


> > What happens if this [qualia]  switch is inverted, and it turns
> greenness on?
>

The short answer is I don't think anything would happen, not subjectively
and not objectively. In fact I strongly suspect the question isn't even
meaningful, it would be like asking how would things be different if we
discovered that William Shakespeare didn't write the plays but they were
written by another actor named William Shakespeare who lived in
Stratford-on-Avon in the late 16th and early 17th century.

If in your entire life you had seen nothing but a completely uniform glow
of blue light I don't believe you'd be aware of BLUENESS or even be aware
of light. A color qualia only has meaning if it can be associated with
other things and ideas in your memory. There may be a less extreme example
of this in the historical record; in the Iliad and Odyssey Homer mentions
all the other colors a lot but he never mentions blue. To Homer the sky was
the void and the void has no color, and the sea wasn't blue it was "wine
dark". Some have speculated that Homer wasn't blind just color blind, but
there may be a more interesting explanation. In Homer's environment there
were lots of red things you could manipulate, and white things and black
things and brown things and yellow things and green things, but there were
very few blue things, you can't manipulate the sky or the sea. And it
wasn't just Homer, if you study the history of writing you find that in
every language a word for BLUENESS always comes last. If ancient people
even possessed the BLUENESS qualia they apparently thought it too
unimportant to mention.

So if I suddenly switched everybody's REDNESS and GREENNESS qualia people
would still subjectively associate blood with tomatoes, and they would
still associate leaves with emeraldsr, and they would still use the phrase
"nature red in tooth and claw"  and "green with envy". So I don't think
anybody would notice a thing, they would only notice if you switched the
color qualia for blood but kept the one for tomatoes the same.

> We know that redness exists more surely than we know 650NM light exists.


I believe that too, it is less abstract because REDNESS being a part of
consciousness is fundamental but 650NM light is not.  And now I want to ask
you a very very important question, do you believe as I do that
consciousness is fundamental?  And if you don't do you think anything is,
or do you think the chain of "why" questions can be meaningfully continued
for infinity?

>> REDNESS is something that is very concrete,  650 nm light is more
>> abstract, and a theory with a further layer of abstraction on top of that
>> would be that the 650 nm light is coming from a red tomato.
>
>
> > Wait, now he is talking about his knowledge of the world,
>

No, I'm talking about a theory that something outside myself has something
to do with my direct experience, the theory that a abstract thing called
650 nm light is somehow connected to something that I know with certainty
to exist, REDNESS. There is nothing realer or more concrete than direct
experience.

> The fact that you don't distinguish between the real world, and your
> knowledge of such, is clear in all you say.


On the contrary I make a very clear distinction. I know something about
knowledge, in fact knowledge (information) is the only thing that I or
anybody else knows anything about. Our brain invents theories to explain
the signals that come from our sense organs. Those theories explain how
some sense sensations relate to other sense sensations.

For example we receive information from our eyes, we interpret that
information as a rock moving at high speed and heading toward a large plate
glass window, we invent a theory that predicts that very soon we will
receive another sensation, this time from our ears, that we will describe
as the sound of breaking glass. Soon our prediction is confirmed so the
theory is successful; but we should remember that the sound of broken glass
is not broken glass, the look of broken glass is not broken glass, the feel
of broken glass is not broken glass. What "IS" broken glass? It must have
stable properties of some sort or I wouldn't be able to identify it as a
"thing". I don't know what those ultimate stable properties are, but I know
what they are not, they are not sense sensations, they are not qualia. I
have no idea what glass "IS". The sad truth is, I can point to "things" but
I don't know what a thing "IS" and I'm not even sure that I know what "IS"
is.


> > Your knowledge of 650 NM light is more abstract.
>

No it is not. I don't know if it's correct or not but I know with a
certainty that needs no proof that my knowledge of  650 NM light exists,
but if you tell me that a new attribute of 650 NM light itself exists I'm
going to need proof.


>  > Real physical light is something that is very physically real (not
> abstract),
>

Less abstract than direct experience? Don't be silly.

> a redness quality is less abstract than anything.


I could not agree with you more. So what are we arguing about?

  John K Clark
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