[ExI] Optical illusion tricks you into seeing different colors

Stathis Papaioannou stathisp at gmail.com
Wed May 19 17:30:20 UTC 2021


On Thu, 20 May 2021 at 03:09, spike jones via extropy-chat <
extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote:

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> *…*> *On Behalf Of *Adrian Tymes via extropy-chat
>
> *Subject:* Re: [ExI] Optical illusion tricks you into seeing different
> colors
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> On Wed, May 19, 2021 at 9:48 AM spike jones via extropy-chat <
> extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote:
>
> Wouldn’t it be cool to somehow create a device that could measure this?  A
> color can’t really be doing the exact same thing in every brain, ja?
>
> >… unproductive discussions on the meaning of "qualia" (which is one of
> the reasons why I suggested ceasing use of that word)…
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> The concept of qualia is tricky and always has been.  The terminology is
> going to be as tricky as the concept.
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> 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!
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> In order to give me some idea (after all this time) what is qualia (or
> what ARE qualia? (is one qualia a qualium?)) we need some kind of objective
> instrument or device which somehow measures what a brain is doing.
>
The singular of qualia is quale. Qualia are synonymous with experiences. We
can measure what a brain is doing when a human subject says “I see a red
strawberry” and we can measure what a self-driving car is doing when it
says “I see a red light” but we can’t know what they are experiencing. We
can guess that if the human subject’s brain processes are similar to our
own, their experiences are similar to our own, but we can’t know. Even if
we could somehow connect our own brain to the human subject or the car,
altering our experiences, all we would know is what the melded being
experiences.

> --
Stathis Papaioannou
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