[ExI] Optical illusion tricks you into seeing different colors

Adrian Tymes atymes at gmail.com
Wed May 19 17:25:17 UTC 2021


On Wed, May 19, 2021 at 10:09 AM spike jones via extropy-chat <
extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote:

> The concept of [CENSORED] is tricky and always has been.  The terminology
> is going to be as tricky as the concept.
>
>
>
> Being an engineer and math guy, I like things that are stone cold
> objective.  I like it when steel and engineering meet to create a car that
> wins a race, which is why I like self-driving race cars even more: it takes
> the subjectiveness of the human brain out of the picture.  Cool!
>
>
>
> In order to give me some idea (after all this time) what is [CENSORED] (or
> what ARE [CENSORED]? (is one [CENSORED] a [CENSORED] ?)) we need some kind
> of objective instrument or device which somehow measures what a brain is
> doing.
>

I have slightly edited your message to try to make my point clearer.

It appears that almost all discussions of that word reduce to unproductive
attempts to more precisely define that word.

So...maybe it would be better to simply stop using that word, entirely.
And don't try to make another shorthand word for the concept, either.

Instead, say exactly what one means.  It has been amply demonstrated that
that word does not mean (to others) what any given person thinks it means,
so this precludes using that word.

It would be superior if there was a single definition of "qualia" that
everyone could agree on.  Literal years of discussion have demonstrated
that this is difficult, maybe impossible, to achieve for that particular
word.  Given this status of that word, it seems better to simply stop using
that word entirely, and back off to stating the definitions that one would
have tried to summarize with that word.
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