[ExI] Mental Phenomena

[Brent Allsop]

Hi Adrian,



Let me try this.


I claim all of the following are facts:


1. In order to define a word like “red”, like your mother did, you need to
point to something and say: “That is red”.

2. Physical Knowledge of red is only arbitrarily related to red as
demonstrated by the facts portrayed in this video
<https://canonizer.com/videos/consciousness/>.  In other words, any brain
could arbitrarily use different sets of physics, like your greenness, to
represent red with.

3.  Since there are two different sets of physics here, we need two
different words to adequately model all of these physical facts.  For
example, red for something that reflects or emits red light.  Redness as
the quality of the of your knowledge of red.  (My redness could be like
your greenness.)

4.  If we don’t use two words, we can’t model the arbitrary relationship
(i.e. our models and language are qualia blind.)

4.  We also need a different label for physical properties like color.  For
example, colorness is the subjective quality of physics we can directly
experience in our brain.  Let’s call this colorness.

5.  The redness quality we subjective experience has causal properties; in
that it causes us to say: “That is red.”

6.  It is a hypothetical possibility that our descriptions of the causal
properties of glutamate, as it reacts in a synapse, are the same physical
properties we directly experience as redness, which causes us to say: That
is red.

7.  In that case the color of glutamate would be “white” and the colorness
of glutamate would be “redness”.

8.  In other words, you would define both the words glutamate and redness,
by pointing to a pile of glutamate.

[image: image.png]



On Wed, Jan 8, 2020 at 6:54 PM Adrian Tymes via extropy-chat <
extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote:

> On Wed, Jan 8, 2020 at 5:43 PM Brent Allsop via extropy-chat <
> extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote:
>
>> So, does anyone disagree that physicists can’t yet tell us the
>> qualitative color of anything?
>>
>
> 1) Absence of comment does not constitute agreement or disagreement.
>
> 2) The term "qualitative color" is basically meaningless.  You can state a
> definition, sure, but as a not-widely-used term it can be redefined in the
> next post and quite probably no one would notice.
>
> 3) If you mean to ask about some phenomenon in the brain (such as what
> exactly happens after red photons enter a person's eye, that generates
> perception and memory), that's biology, not physics.  The fact that
> physicists are not experts on the biology of the brain does not itself make
> the workings of the brain a mystery beyond all human comprehension.
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> extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org
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