[ExI] What is Consciousness?

Sat Mar 25 20:50:11 UTC 2023

On Sat, Mar 25, 2023 at 3:24 PM Giovanni Santostasi via extropy-chat <
extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote:

> Brent is making a big difference between the "*direct"* perception of red
> of a person and the derived recognition of a red stimuli by a robot (using
> the RED word to describe that). But there is nothing direct about our
> perception of red. It is also a derived experience. There are several steps
> to go from the electromagnetic vibration of light to the recognition of red
> in a human. At each step there is exactly a translation from a dictionary,
> in a sense. It starts with the receptors in the retina that "translate" the
> chemical reaction happening in a given receptor to a particular code based
> on neuron spiking. This signal is transmitted to different parts of the
> brain to be processed and redirected to other regions of the brain to be
> further processed. At each step, there is a sort of translation made of
> neurotransmitters and electrical impulses.
> Yes, it is marvelous in the end we perceive something that we recognize as
> red. It is the mystery of consciousness but it is not a mystery from a
> scientific point of view (we understand most of the components and it is
> just a matter of putting everything together in a coherent whole) but from
> an existential point of view. Red feels as something because it is the way
> for the brain to tell us something is happening. How else would it do it?
> If it whispered the word "RED" it would feel also as something (of course
> an absurd idea because the brain has no idea of English a priori but it can
> and it does know how to manipulate neurons that create sensations). This
> doesn't happen only with colors but basically any bodily sensation, yes, it
> is fascinating we feel them and we aware of them but it is not science job
> to explain how this happens besides what it is already doing and explain
> the chain of event to make this happen. I have the FEELING that Brent is
> asking for science to make us FEEL red by listening how experience of red
> is processed by the brain. But that is not what science is about.
>
>
>

Some relevant quotations on this subject:

"[Intellect:] By convention there is sweet, by convention there is bitter,
by convention there is color; in actuality only atoms and the void.
[Senses:] "Poor Intellect, do you hope to defeat us while from us you
borrow your evidence? Your victory is your defeat."

-- Democritus in "Fragment 9
<https://www.google.com/books/edition/Ancilla_to_the_Pre_Socratic_Philosophers/B75GgVdxYT0C?hl=en&gbpv=1&dq=by%20convention&pg=PA93&printsec=frontcover>
and 125
<https://www.google.com/books/edition/Ancilla_to_the_Pre_Socratic_Philosophers/B75GgVdxYT0C?hl=en&gbpv=1&dq=by%20convention&pg=PA104&printsec=frontcover>
(~420
B.C.)

"I think that tastes, odors, colors, and so on are no more than mere names
so far as the object in which we locate them are concerned, and that they
reside in consciousness. Hence if the living creature were removed, all
these qualities would be wiped away and annihilated."

-- Galileo Galilei in "The Assayer
<https://web.stanford.edu/~jsabol/certainty/readings/Galileo-Assayer.pdf>"
(1623)

“For the rays, to speak properly, are not colored. In them there is nothing
else than a certain power and disposition to stir up a sensation of this or
that color.”

-- Isaac Newton in "Opticks
<https://archive.org/details/opticks0000siri/page/124/mode/2up?q=%22For+the+rays%22>"
(1704)

“We suppose that a physical process starts from a visible object, travels
to the eye, there changes into another physical process, causes yet another
physical process in the optic nerve, and finally produces some effects in
the brain, simultaneously with which we see the object from which the
process started, the seeing being something “mental,” totally different in
character from the physical processes, which preceded and accompany it.
This view is so queer that metaphysicians have invented all sorts of
theories designed to substitute something less incredible.”

-- Bertrand Russell in “An Outline of Philosophy
<https://archive.org/details/in.ernet.dli.2015.222952/page/n157/mode/2up?q=%22We+suppose+that+a+physical+process+starts+from+a+visible+object%22>”
(1927)

“If you ask a physicist what is his idea of yellow light, he will tell you
that it is transversal electromagnetic waves of a wavelength in the
neighbourhood of 590 millimicrons. If you ask him; But where does yellow
come in? He will say: In my picture not at all, but these kinds of
vibrations, when they hit the retina of a healthy eye, give the person
whose eye it is the sensation of yellow.” [...] “The sensation of colour
cannot be accounted for by the physicist’s objective picture of
light-waves. Could the physiologist account for it, if he had fuller
knowledge than he has of the processes in the retina and the nervous
processes set up by them in the optical nerve bundles and in the brain? I
do not think so. We could at best attain an objective knowledge of what
nerve fibres are excited and in what proportion, perhaps even to know
exactly the processes they produce in certain brain cells–whenever our mind
registers the sensation of yellow in a particular direction or domain of
our field of vision. But even such intimate knowledge would not tell us
anything about the sensation of colour.”

-- Mind and Matter
<https://archive.org/details/mindmatter0000schr/page/n11/mode/2up> - Erwin
Schrödinger (1958)

“An electron is neither red nor blue nor any other colour; the same holds
for the proton, the nucleus of the hydrogen atom. But the union of the two
in the atom of hydrogen, according to the physicist, produces
electromagnetic radiation of a certain discrete array of wavelengths. The
homogenous constituents of this radiation, when separated by a prism or an
optical grating, stimulate in an observer the sensations of red, green,
blue, violet by the intermediary of certain physiological processes, whose
general character is sufficiently well known to assert that they are not
red or green or blue, in fact that the nervous elements in question display
no colour in virtue of their being stimulated; the white or gray the nerve
cells exhibit whether stimulated or not is certainly insignificant in
respect of the colour sensation which, in the individual whose nerves they
are, accompanies their excitation.”

-- Mind and Matter
<https://archive.org/details/mindmatter0000schr/page/n11/mode/2up> - Erwin
Schrödinger (1958)

"So how do I know that you experience the same thing when you talk about
redness? Perhaps you experience red the way I experience blue, and vice
versa. How can we test our assumptions that we experience these qualities
the same way? Indeed, we do know there are some differences. Since I have
what is misleadingly labeled “red-green” color-blindness, there are shades
of color that appear identical to me that appear different to others. Those
of you without this disability apparently have a different experience than
I do. What are you all experiencing? I’ll never know."

-- Ray Kurzweil in "The Age of Spiritual Machines
<https://archive.org/details/ageofspiritualm000kurz/page/56/mode/2up?q=%22experience+the+same+thing+when+you+talk+about+redness%22>"
(1999)

"The great progress of neuroscience in understanding the mechanisms
underlying color experience has been unable to provide the color-blind with
*any* insight–zero, nothing, nada–into what it’s like to have color
experience, and there is no reason at all to think this will change when a
few more details are added."

-- Phillip Goff <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philip_Goff_(philosopher)>
in "Galileo’s Error
<https://www.google.com/books/edition/Galileo_s_Error/7OW2DwAAQBAJ?hl=en&gbpv=1&bsq=%22unable%20to%20provide%20the%20color-blind%22&printsec=frontcover>"
(2019)

Jason
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