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Consider a community of intelligent agents whose eyes have the following flaw: there is an area of the retina of the eye where there are no photodetectors, with the result that the visual field experienced by an agent contains a black spot somewhere near the center of the field. The human eye has exactly such a flaw (where the optic nerve originates) but the human brain removes the existence of the flaw from the higher awareness of the individual. In contrast to the human case, suppose our hypothetical intelligent agents remain aware of the flaw (or can become aware of it whenever they choose to do so).
Suppose further that one day one of these agents, named Mitchell, addresses the physicists of the community as follows:
A physicist named Dick replies,
Let me stop here, Mitchell, and ask you to confirm that yes, the account given by the fictional intelligent agent Dick is a satisfactory account of the black disk and is a satisfactory answer to the fictional Mitchell.
Second, let me ask you to confirm, please, that yes, for the fictional Mitchell to ask Dick, "At what stage do the quarks, photons, etc, of your physical model turn into a massless or momentum-conservation-violating black disk?" reveals a confusion between representation of reality and reality -- that is, between map and territory?
I am a little discouraged by your framing it as a joke. You made an argument about consciousness, then I pointed out that the same argument holds for symphonic music. I sincerely, non-jokingly did not understand what is different about consciousness that made your argument apply there, but not apply to symphonic music.
But anyway, you expanded your argument as follows:
Let me ask you this: suppose I show you a computer program with rich, complex non-spatial relationships between elements of the computer program. Would you consider that evidence of the poverty and the unsatisfactoriness of our current physical model?
If you answer no, please explain what it is about you at the level of physical law that is intrinsically different from a computer program.
Symphonies: well, they have parts, vocal parts and instrumental parts. The pun obscures matters and I didn't want to go there.
You bring up the physical ontology of computer programs and whether people are different. Computer programs introduce a new slate of complications because they are typically perceived and discussed in a way as full of imputed intentionality as when someone reads a book. As a physical object, a page of text is just ink on paper in a complicated pattern. The meaning is not intrinsic to the physical object. The same thing goes for computer programs. Physically, a given program is a pattern of magnetizations on a disk, a pattern of charge distributions in an integrated circuit, etc. We have computational devices constructed to be finite-state machines of a particular specification, an elaborate array of cultural props such as programming languages which allow us to think of these states and their components as being about anything and everything, and finally we have media-technology peripherals to enhance the illusion by presenting our senses, and not just our intellects, with simulacra.
Now of course the standard cognitive-neuro view of human beings is that, with the ability to move around autonomously thrown into the definition, this is essentially what we are too: finite-state machines with peripherals, all made out of atoms. If our thoughts manage to be "about" something, it's because of what caused those inner states and/or because of how everyone else would interpret them (causal and social theories of intentionality, respectively).
According to the quantum-monadic hypothesis, what makes us different to the computers we have is not carbon versus silicon, it's quantum versus classical computation. Any entity which forms interior entanglements with a high degree of freedom is at least potentially conscious; anything which doesn't, is not. A conscious monad is still a finite-state machine too, when viewed as a black box causally interacting with the world; but (this is the theory, remember) it contains intrinsic intentionality, whereas an entity which reproduces its causality in a way which has many physically separate parts, does not. You could almost say that a complex monad is made of "qualia and intentionality" (sensations and thought, basically), and that you can simulate the causal dispositions of such a complex monad using a multitude of simple ones, but you will not have thereby materialized actual sensations and thought into being.
I realize I'm making still further ex cathedra statements here, when apparently I still haven't persuaded anyone of the plausibility of the previous batch, but though I'm engaging a little bit with the criticism, I am at this point mostly just trying to convey a novel way of thinking. I see that even the mere exposition of the viewpoint is going to require a lot of work, to say nothing of its justification.
Pun? No, that's a metaphor (combined with a reductio). A pun is when you exploit an ambiguity that hinges on a phonetic similarity.
More importantly, it's not up to you to decide whether you need to "go there". You used a chain of reasoning about consciousness. Richard Hollerith pointed out that the very same reasoning can apply to symphonies, thereby showing your reasoning to lead to invalid results. So you need to refine the reasoning, not just dismiss it as a pun, which isn't even the right label.
I don't think it's the ex cathedra bit that bothers anyone here, but the ex pedora [1]. Your'e not even at the point where you can present a coherent, testable (in the broad sense) viewpoint, and you keep finding distinctions that you "should have made" before -- yet you're sure that there's a flaw with the exisitng methods used here. This, despite all the time you've spent on the issue. If correct, you should be able to communicate the idea a lot better than you have been. If the issue's as important as you make it out to be, surely a little more effort on your part is justified when you make top-level posts.
[1] "from the foot-mouth", a term I just made up, which I don't even think is valid Latin. But it's closer to being a pun than the symphony thing!
I see now that I didn't want to dodge matters because of the "pun", I just tried to use that as an excuse. I wanted to dodge this question because "symphonic music" is, for the purposes of an ontological discussion, ambiguous in its reference and introduces much unnecessary new complexity however you interpret it.
I made the assertion that conscious experience - what happens in the mind of one individual at one time - is not made up of spatial parts. Richard said, I could say the same of symphonic music, do you think it can't be reduced to physics either. Well, first of all, what do we mean by symphonic music? Do we mean all the physical performances ever made by the symphonies of the world? Do we mean the experience of the listeners who hear those symphonic performances? Do we mean the abstract specification of a symphony, which those concrete performances attempt to follow? These are all very different things ontologically, their analysis into parts is going to be different, and the analogy/disanalogy with consciousness is also going to be different. It's one big distraction, I instinctively tried to dodge it, you pinned me down, so there's what I should have said to Richard to begin with.
What can I say ... I have refrained for years from talking about this stuff at any length, because I didn't have it all figured out, and I still don't, and simply pointing out the flaws of physicalist orthodoxy changes nothing. On this occasion I have tried the more affirmative approach of introducing a concrete alternative, and I am being induced to bring out extra details as the discussion proceeds. I did not know in advance where the focus would be.
We can skip the details of the story and come straight to the point. Let us suppose that what I see is indeed a two-dimensional data structure in my brain. It has pixels and they are neurally encoded somehow, e.g. by spiking rates.
Now suppose I'm seeing something colored - a blue sky, a red apple, anything. By our hypothesis, what actually exists is nothing but a two-dimensional sheet of neurons all firing in different rhythms - ions moving across membranes, and so forth.
Where is the blueness or the redness, if this and only this is the reality?
It seems to me you have two choices. Either blueness is nothing but ions plunging back and forth across a membrane with a certain regularity; or, there is no such thing as blueness - only talk of blueness, neural dispositions to categorize as blue, and so on.
I think that what people usually imagine is that the ions-crossing-the-membrane-at-a-certain-rate "is" the blueness, but they do this by mentally juxtaposing the physical picture (if they think it through that far) with the blueness that they actually see and experience. But in that case they've gone beyond the nothing-but-the-atoms provision. Or, the troublesome color-word will be buried in a larger phrase, and so all those neural firings are identified with "seeing blue" or "the experience of seeing blue". But I don't see how that solves anything, although psychologically it has the effect of directing your attention away from the blueness itself, towards the more abstract states in which it features. And being more abstract, perhaps it is easier - perhaps it is subjectively more plausible - to imagine that they are nothing but neural computations. However, that's just a trick that you play on yourself.
So I bite the bullet and say, the blueness is obviously there, somewhere in reality; it is obviously not there in a physics which consists of nothing but point masses moving back and forth, or any of the other, slightly more complex physical ontologies on offer; so, I had better seek a perspective on physics in which there is a place where it might be. This is the point of a monadic interpretation of entanglement. I don't say it's the only way to do it, but it is a way to create the necessary room.
This is a linguistic fact, not a phenomenological one. Our language happens to distinguish verbs by referring to their objects, subjects and using adverbial modifiers. But the language could have just as easily had a one-word verb phrase than means "experience blueness". Say this word was "bluep". If this were the case we wouldn't be asking where the object of blueping was. Rather, we'd see blueping as fundamental and would easily identify blueping with a particular configuration of neural firings.
Since blueness is a phenomenological quality I can't imagine finding it anywhere except as an object modifier of experience. I don't see how a monadic interpretation of entanglement changes that fact-- you're just associating the configurations (or whatever) of monads with the subjective experience of blueness. Blueness itself is meaningless.
Yes, I'd say blueping is one of your "fundamental concepts that can't be dissolved." But to me it's no surprise that sensations of the five senses are the fundamental units of experience. The only reason I think people posit that there is more to experience than mere sensation is that they say, "What about thinking and emotions? Those are experience but not really sensations of the five senses."
My theory - developed for entirely separate reasons - is that all thinking is done in the (imagined) five senses, but that we don't notice because it's usually happening too fast, or is auto-ignored because the background sensory processes aren't generally relevant and would overwhelm our conscious mind. The sensory thought processes can be noticed in some special situations, though, which is how I found out about them. (In fact, I'm heading to an isolation tank this afternoon to try to "see" more of my own thoughts.) My theory says that emotions are primarily (or perhaps only) imagined physical sensations. I hope to write a main post on the theory once it's more developed.
Anyway, that would indicate that all experience is sensation, hence it would be natural to consider blueping as fundamental (or if you like, undissolvable).
Be warned: thoughts have properties and connections that appear only when summoned. For example, suppose I take a sentence or two from my inner monologue and try to analyze the voice. I will imagine hearing it in the voice of a person or character who might say that sort of thing. But the thought wasn't originally in that voice, or any voice at all; trying to inspect details like tone and inflection caused my mind to create those details, more or less at random, where they would not have been created if I hadn't gone looking for them. I can connect any thought to one of the senses in this way, but that doesn't mean that the connection was there before I summoned it. Words are imported through hearing, but there's no reason the brain has to maintain that connection.
On the other hand, minds vary. People with synesthesia definitely have stronger connections between their senses and other thoughts than normal. Someone with a slightly more active auditory cortex might hear their inner monologue in a specific voice even if they weren't trying to. There're many possibilities, and spending some time in a tank or meditative state to figure out how your mind works is a great idea.
I believe you're cautioning that maybe what I'm noticing are sensory patterns my mind attaches to the thoughts after the fact, when I go in and try to analyze them, rather than the thoughts themselves. I actually had a few false starts this way, but later on I found what I think are my internal representations of the structure of logical reasoning. They are like fundamental thought-widgets (visual and physical, àla Einstein's claim) that fit together with a certain set of rules to form meaning. These could be after-the-fact sensory patterns as well, but since they are mostly visual I've started using them to create a picture-only language as a sort of proof-of-concept. I'll share more as it develops.
Also, I try not to think in words. Habitual word thinkers and non-word thinkers will probably have very different reactions to what I've been writing.
I grant that I might just have a particularly strong case of synesthesia. Hopefully the tank will bring answers.
Are you sure about that? Do you think the meaning of "bluep" could be conveyed to young humans without having blue objects to point at and without those humans at least forming a concept of blue? I also doubt that this would make physicalism any easier subjectively. Whether it's the experience or the object of the experience which is regarded as blue, something's blue.
I have to go offline now, right in the middle of some heated real-time exchanges. Don't anyone get too steamed if you don't hear back from me for a day or so. :-)
You're conflating two things. There is the property some objects have of emitting photons with a wavelength of about 475 nanometers. Then there is the phenomenology of seeing such things which is "blueing" or experiencing blue. Teaching children the word blue just involves teaching them how to describe the reflective properties of certain objects.
Now people tend to divide their experiences along similar lines. Thus, the set of all blue objects is that same for most people. We don't disagree that there is a difference between red things and blue things, unless we're color blind. This lets us share a vocabulary of qualia but we have no reason to think that what the words actually refer to are the same for everyone except insofar as we find correspondence between the physical configuration of the brain and reports of subjective experience.
No. Experience isn't blue... not at all in the same way objects are. This is a HUGE category mistake. The verification conditions for claims about "blue experience" are TOTALLY DIFFERENT then verification conditions for claims about blue objects. We might as well have different words.
So, if I understand you correctly, the world is as follows: There are objects that emit "blue" light. And there are nervous systems which respond differently to blue and non-blue light. And some aspect of this differential response is "experiencing blue".
It seems to me that this functions as a way to avoid directly mentioning the problematic entity, i.e. shades of blue. There is a concession that, yes, objects in the external world aren't actually blue. One might suppose, then, that the thing which is actually blue is somewhere in the brain. But instead, by talking about "experiencing blue" as a unit, we get to focus on language ("how to describe the reflective properties of certain objects", "vocabulary of qualia", "verification conditions for claims about 'blue experience'", "reports of subjective experience"), cause and effect, information processing, anything but phenomenal blueness itself.
I'm fine with saying, "There are qualia. They are part of our experience and we need to account for them." The way to do that is to find the brain-state that corresponds to the experience of seeing blue and then (with other information about other brain-states) posit rules that relate subjective experience with brain-states. If we develop computers that report qualia then we can do the same and then generalize the theories and come up with a universal theory of qualia. We want to get to a point where we can say: P1, P2, P3, P4... (which are any set of empirical descriptions of a brain or computer) AND L1, L2, L3...(which are our laws) and then output S1, S2, S3 (descriptions of subjective experience). Once we can do this both ways I would take us to understand qualia and phenomenal experience.
But you keep using language which makes it sound like you're looking for real "blueness" or something. But there is no such thing as blueness except as a way of distinguishing a certain kind of sight experience. I'm not denying that the phenomenal experience of it isn't a real experience just that "experience being blue" is anything like jeans being blue. Jeans are blue in virtue of the fact that when a subject looks at them they experience blueness. So how could that kind of blueness be found within experience? Whatever experiencing-blue is it is likely very different from the property objects have of being blue.
This is all to deny the motivation of looking past neuron firings to find qualia.
Of course I am. I emphasize again that the really undeniable reality (though you are apparently denying it) is the individual shade of color. Color names like blue are fuzzy in scope. But the concrete instances of color which they are intended to categorize very definitely exist.
Your second paragraph is a fascinating exercise in constructing a way to keep colors out of the realm of the real. First, assert that there is no such thing as blueness, except something not actually blue which has the functional properties of blueness:
Second, say that a thing is blue only if it has the property of causing the experience of blueness:
Finally, observe that the cognitively relevant physical properties of the brain are very different from the reflectively relevant physical properties of surfaces, and triumphantly conclude that the blueness in the external world is nothing like the experienced blueness in the brain,
The physicalist vision of a world made solely of quantity, space, and causality has a very strong grip on the imaginations of those who can wield the formalism. But arguments like this really are an exercise in denying reality. The physicalist ontology is a subset of the real ontology and you can see some of what's missing whenever you open your eyes. Just because you don't yet know how to think about it precisely is no excuse for denying that it's there.
Look, an annotated repetition of my argument followed by
amounts to a kind of circumstantial ad hominem fallacy. You don't actually dispute any claim I make you just 'diagnosis' it. It is mildly annoying and throughly unhelpful. Are you really denying that there is a difference between blueness as a phenomenal quality and blueness understood as the reflective quality of an object? Even if you want to say that the experience of looking at the sky is "blue" experience do you actually hold that experience is blue in the same way that the sky is? Do think that experiences have reflective properties? Do the electrons in the atoms of experience drop out of higher energy levels and release photons of different wavelengths?
When we talk about any phenomenal entity, quality or event are we not talking about subjective experience? Isn't the definition phenomenology the study of things as we experience them and not the things in themselves? If so, when we talk about the phenomenon of blueness are we not talking about a kind of experience?
Anyway, I don't even understand how I'm the dogmatic physicalist in this discussion. I'm the one willing to posit fundamental laws that relate brain states to subjective experience. You're the one positing a physical entity with no empirical evidence, which somehow, through the handwaving magic of quantum physics is subjective experience. This is a big point: even if it is the case that a substantial part of subjective experience is accounted for by something other than neuron firings we will still need a separate set of laws to relate the brain state to subjective experience.
The appropriate use of the words has changed along with our ontology. In a mode of naive realism, in which appearances are not distinguished from their external causes, then the blueness of the sky is the blueness of the experience of the sky, because no distinction is being made between sky and experience of sky. However, once you get to the point of distinguishing between the experienced sky and the physical sky, then blueness in the original sense is only a property of the experienced sky, and the new "blueness" of reflective physics is only a property of the physical sky.
The problem now is that in the attempt to reduce experience to physics as well, the original sense of blueness is being banished entirely from discussion, solely in order to achieve the reduction. While it may be annoying to be lectured about how you're evading the question, you say outright
which I take to be an explicit repudiation of the naive concept of blueness as applying to anything, physical sky or experienced sky. And you also said, two steps back,
which suggests that you do understand this motivation, and are deliberately trying to route around it.
What was your reaction to How An Algorithm Feels From Inside, incidentally?
Who modded this up? Is this the standard now for what words a language could have? Whether the concept could be explained to a child? You might as well dismiss the word "oxygen" on the grounds that you can't explain the full chemical model to a child, in a way that allows you to make use of the concept.
In any case, you could explain it to a child: "When you're dreaming about blue, you're just blueping. But when you see blue for real, you're blueping and seeing something blue."
Why is it that "It's impossible to explain ..." always seems to say so much more about the speaker than the concept?
I already explained how blueness can arise: you have to distinguish between kinds of data, and your phenomenal experience of blue, is your label for the kind of data that is blue. Just as a program can use generated symbols to distinguish two kinds of data, you can distinguish between red and blue, or between sight and sounds, by being able to notice distinct traits about them that resist deeper scrutiny at the usual level of operation.
This is an instance of the fallacy described in Explaining vs Explaining Away. Color can be explained by neuroscience and physics, but it can't explain color away because it's still there after you learn what underlies it. You don't have to modify physics to make color real, because it's already real, as an abstraction layered on top of physics.
Mitchell did acknowledge the existence of the identity view.
I asked you four direct questions, the first three of which can be disposed of with a yes or a no. Do you not want to answer any of them?
I also asked a question. Could you answer that one first?
A few minutes after I stepped away from the keyboard, I had a revelation about your story - something that was probably obvious to you, but which just seemed like an odd non sequitur to me until now. My alter ego in your story doesn't just think that he sees a black disk, he thinks there's a black disk literally floating in front of him all his life, which is why he goes on about momentum, yes? I had thought momentum was just thrown in there as a random physics buzzword. And so your alter ego is doing nothing but explaining that hallucinations are possible, I think.
This is coming at the problem from the wrong level. The experience of blueness is a problem for physics whether it's veridical blueness or hallucinated blueness. Either way it's there at the level of experience, and either way it's not there at the level of neural physics. I will answer your four questions tomorrow, if you still want me to, but I think you're not engaging with the challenge here. Unless you intend to maintain that the whole of humanity's experience of color is unreal.
Why do you keep attributing this view to people here? I'm sure you've been corrected on it enough times. No one denies that people experience color. The claim is just that the reductionist materialist ontology is sufficient to explain why it happens, and it is due to a more fundamental phenomenon.
Yes.
Reading that was an aha moment for me in that I had not considered that that might be your position. Please allow me to explore your position a little.
If I step on a nail, the resulting sensation of pain is a problem for physics, too?
And if my toe non-painfully bumps into a marble, the resulting sensation of touch or bump is a problem, too?
If I get in my car to go to the store to buy some ice cream, but then I learn that the road to the store is closed, then I decide that finding an alternative way to get to the store is not worth the trouble of having the ice cream, is some aspect of that experience a problem for physics, too? Perhaps the desire for ice cream. Or the intention to satisfy the desire. Or the abandonment of the intention.
If the answer to all of those questions is yes, then is there any internal experience you have had or could have some day which is not a problem for physics?
Well, no need to answer the first two because I consider what I am replying to an answer to those two.
ADDED. Let me continue my exploration of your position a little. I am walking in the woods. I sit down. I become aware of a mushroom on a log. Then I change my position and I realize that what I thought was a mushroom is really just part of the log. Now I have a question about this transitory nonvericidal experience of a mushroom in my mind. Is it a problem for physics, too?
What I really want to ask is more complicated, and I am probably not setting up the question correctly, but let me ask anyway. Suppose I am sitting in the woods having the experience of seeing a log. Suspend your disbelief and suppose (against your belief) that there is a materialistic reductionistic account for that situation including my experience at that moment. Suppose my mental state then changes so that I think I have come to notice a particular species of very tasty mushroom on the log. Suppose the mushroom is not really there, but rather that my experience of noticing a mushroom is caused by an improbable coincidence in the shape and color of a small part of the log. Is my noticing the nonvericidal mushroom a problem for physics even if (counterfactually, according to your model of reality) my experience of seeing the log does not pose a problem for physics?
In the end, no. Physics as we know it contains neither qualia nor intentionality nor anything like the unity of consciousness, so no. But colors are particularly obviously not there in the physics we have.
Having taken such a radical stance, I want to emphasize what I'm not saying. I'm not saying conscious experience is indescribable. I'm not even saying it's indescribable mathematically. Consciousness is a sequence of states; those states have structure and can be compared to each other; we can describe those states using a formalism; we can also describe and analyze the transitions of state and theorize about a larger causal and ontological framework which would produce them and explain them.
I am saying two or three things.
First proposition: It would be a mistake to think that the descriptive formalism is the reality. It's more a calculus for reasoning about the reality.
Second proposition: Belief in physicalism is largely a belief that a particular descriptive formalism is the reality. Because the elements of the formalism are descended from elements of actual experience - e.g. geometry from the experience of space - when people think of reality in terms of physics, they do employ sensory intuitions and not just formal abstractions, so it's not just reification of formalism, but that is a large part of what goes on.
Third proposition - this is the controversial part: The formalism we have actually does not correspond to the manifest nature of consciousness; even if you try to see it in the proper way (according to the first proposition above), no part of the physics we have can in fact be identified with the consciousness we have. This is behind my proposals for minor modifications on the formal level (a single-world physics of transitions between spacelike-tensored Hilbert-space vectors, etc). The objective is to permit a nondualistic ontology true to the actual nature of consciousness.
Postscript: Given the categorical nature of my answer to your first question - all of experience poses a problem for physics - your final question is rendered a little unnecessary. But I should say something about it anyway. After all, I could re-pose it in a form that asked whether the situation described is a problem for monadological physics. I don't think it is, because the chief problems actually stem from the ontology of what Husserl called the "transcendental" aspect of consciousness, the part that transcends veridicality. This is really just a fancy way of saying: the properties of consciousness which are independent of whether appearances are correct. Qualia are there whether or not you're hallucinating, and even hallucinated objects (because they are interpreted sensations) have a structure of intentionality. And even a misinterpreted sensation is still an interpreted sensation, so the example of the illusory mushroom doesn't add anything new at that level.
Well, thanks for replying to my questions.
My guess is that you are the victim of a failure of imagination: specifically, you fail to imagine everything an imperfect information-processing model-maintaining agent might falsely believe. Specifically, such an agent might falsely believe that aspects of its own operation are irreducible primitives. You keep on asserting that subjective experiences are irreducible to the primitives of the standard physical model, but you have not presented anything that I consider evidence for that.
The only way I can think of for you to make progress on moving me towards your point of view is for you to point out a problem with the standard model of physics using the vocabulary of the technical theory of how any agent can come to have an accurate model of its environment (Jaynes, Pearl, universal prior, Solomonoff induction, etc).
Whereas from my perspective, no-one is explaining how any particular higher-level physical property can be identified with a color - for example. As I just asked Robin Z, please explain to me what's green about a causal disposition or a physical motion.
I have yet to see any such explanation. Instead I just see assertion of identity, or a discourse structured to avoid talking directly about color.
I am skeptical that quantitative epistemology is much use here, because it is usually practised in a mindset which is already treating everything abstractly.
Perhaps the key is to get people into a state of mind in which they are genuinely attending to the "qualia" themselves, and in which it is not assumed that they must be reducible to the physics we have, and then to have them ponder afresh whether the alleged identities above (green as a causal disposition, green as a physical motion) actually make sense. Also throw in a warning to beware treating the possibility of systematic association as identity: imagining that the occurrence of greenness is always accompanied by some physical process or condition, is not the same thing as perceiving that greenness could be identical to the physical counterpart.
And I've answered you several times, which is why it's specifically my comments that you avoid.
Let's go over this again: computer programs are in the very same dilemma. They use generated symbols. GensymA refers to this data. GensymB refers to that data. MetaGensym1 refers to the group {GensymA, GensymB, ...}.
It can tell any two gensyms apart. It can tell any metagensym group apart. But from the program's perspective, it cannot tell what is "GensymA-ish" about this data, or "GensymB-ish" about that data -- just whether they are or aren't. Between two program instances, all of this (within limits) could be switched around, and there would be no multi-program GensymA.
You already know how this situation arises from the physicalist reductionist account.
You simply have to recognize yourself as being in that same scenario. Your internal, truly-part-of-you labels for different phenomena are the qualia -- which accounts for the problematic aspects of qualia.
Does this resolve the issue completely? Of course not. Among many other things, we need to figure out what (seemingly efficient) data representation method the brain uses that causes the specific aspects of color, like its ability to vary in shade, and vary orthogonally to the sounds you hear. But there's a clear research program there and a coherent picture from a reductionist account.
Incidentally, it may amuse you that others have (independently, for all I can tell) come to entirely similar conclusions:
The above comes from Quining Qualia by Daniel Dennett - the citations are to:
You state the essence of your view here:
And I presume that the "blue data" is called blue, not because it is literally blue in the old-fashioned sense, but because it's caused by physical "blueness", or just because that's the name we're using for a particular range of data values.
To paraphrase what I just said to Richard: in effect, you are saying that the experience of color is the experience of colorlessness, plus a color label. Which is the same as saying that I don't actually see color, I just think I see color.
To move me toward your point of view, you would need to do one of three things. (1) Show me that I am wrong in my expectation that your proposal will lead to an "ontology" (an account of reality) with significantly higher Kolmogorov complexity than the conventional ontology. (2) Present evidence that outweighs the higher Kolmogorov complexity. In particular, present evidence that not only prefers an ontology consistent with your proposal, but also does so to such a degree so as to outweigh the higher Kolmogorov complexity. (3) Cause me to come to doubt the epistemology I am using (universal prior, Bayesian updating, etc).
It would interest me to know whether you find any fault in my position as expressed above, Mitchell, because your finding a fault would be a strong sign that our differences in this thread stem from differences over epistemology.
I have not assumed anything of the sort. I am simply noticing that in contrast to what you seem to believe, qualia are not sufficiently strong evidence against the conventional ontology to satisfy condition (2) above.
(I will now quote again from the same sentence I quoted from above, but this time I will omit a different passage.)
Do you sincerely believe that the people replying to you here neglected genuinely to attend to "the qualia themselves" when they considered your words and how to reply to them? I assure you that I for one did not. Just now, in fact, I caused myself to experience blueness while reflecting on your argument. It was no more persuasive than the last couple of times I did it.
Did you remind yourself that what you are experiencing is inside your head, which according to conventional physics is composed entirely of colorless entities, and notice that nonetheless, something inside your head - a particular sensation - managed to be blue? If so, how did you deal with the contradiction?
We can have a dispute about the Kolmogorov complexity of different explanations once we agree on what it is that we're trying to explain.
And a color blind person may never see green. I wonder, if everybody was color blind would green cease to be a fundamental property of physics?
Back up: since when has color been a fundamental property of physics? Wavelength is, but wavelength and color are not identical.
Why not? Roughly speaking, if everyone was 2-dimensional, why would we see the world as 3-dimensional?
Edit: this came out wrong, for obscure reasons.
Since we have good reason to believe that the manifest nature of consciousness (i.e., our own personal sense of it) is not true to the actual nature of consciousness, I do not find this lack of correspondence troubling.
Man, this thread is a karma mint. I think I'll just refrain from commenting unless I have something really good to say.
Upvoted. (;
Question: Is this post on the LW server at the level of semiconductor physics?
It's like asking whether a book is just ink on paper. As a physical object that's all it is. As a message it also has a semantic content, but that is ascribed rather than intrinsic.
As a physical object it's a complex arrangement of subatomic particles and photons - the ink and the paper are as much ascribed qualities as the text. To pretend that the levels above the physical are not real is to commit the fallacy of greedy reductionism. See the link about "explaining vs. explaining away", elsewhere.
To make my point more explicit: what relevant difference do you see between (1) the relationship between mental phenomena and the neural physics and (2) the relationship between the message and the ink on the paper? Or better, between (1) and (3) the relationship between the videogame and the physics of the electronic systems in the console?
Physical composition is not observer-dependent, interpretation is.
In a universe made solely of causally interacting particles in motion, there are plenty of complex higher-level properties: conjunctive properties, configurational properties, averaging properties, counterfactual properties. But you will find neither colors nor meanings. When dealing with problematic entities like these, physicalists either redefine them in purely physical terms, or posit untenable identities between the real thing and its supposed physical counterpart. The first class of explanation evades the problem and is really eliminativism, and the second class of explanation is a law of psychophysical correspondence and is really dualism.
So perhaps you can anticipate how I will answer your questions. If we posit a universe such as physicists presently posit, there simply are no mental phenomena, including the interpretations required to make patterns of ink into messages and patterns of phosphor into games. If we posit a "physics" which does include mentality, then such interpretations can exist, but they only exist in the lifeworlds of those who make them, and not intrinsically in the artefacts themselves.
You asked elsewhere what I thought of How An Algorithm Feels From Inside. It is the kernel of one possible explanation of why someone might "feel an impulse to go on arguing whether the object is really a blegg", and as an explanation it's incomplete both causally and ontologically. For a causally complete explanation, Network 1 and Network 2 would need to be embedded in some larger network that determines which questions actually get asked. For an ontologically complete explanation, something has to be said about how and why an algorithm feels like anything at all, and what a feeling is in the first place. And to really tie it all together, you would have to make the feeling of the algorithm causally relevant in the larger network (this would be bringing consciousness into contact with cognition).
I'm sorry, this is just assertion with a broader vocabulary. You, personally, don't find physicalist explanations of experience like Eliezer Yudkowsky's sufficient. Nobody needed the three hundred words of pleonastic vocabulary you just foisted upon us to learn this fact - you've already told us.
What evidence do you have that reductive explanations of subjective experience are wrong?
The fact that they don't explain it. (Feel free to explain what's green about an act of classification or a neuron firing at a particular frequency, two popular reductive "explanations" of color. There's a nice instance of green up in the site banner, if you need an actual example to contemplate.)
I have to agree with you there: it feels like Mitchell_Porter unnecessarily throws around jargon in these discussions :-/ But the post you replied to wasn't the worst case: I'd nominate the fourth paragraph here.