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Mitchell_Porter comments on How to think like a quantum monadologist - Less Wrong
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Not quite. It is an experiment in seeing whether the people who insist that there is no problem may be moved by seeing a concrete alternative, rather than being told that their existing account of color, etc, is inadequate. (See first paragraph, last sentences.) No success so far.
What do I think of Dennett? It is a while since I read him. But while of course I disagree with him, I think he is a superior exponent of the true consequences of standard physicalism. I have accused most physicalists of being stealth dualists, who posit an association between, say, color and some computational or other physical property, but call it an identity. Dennett simply says, there is no subjective color (which he calls "figment") and no unity of consciousness ("the Cartesian theater"). These are just intersubjective figures of speech, etc. And he's quite right: subjective color and the unity of consciousness do not exist in standard physics. But they do actually exist, which is why I've posited a monadic physics. A conscious monad is a Cartesian theater, a place where the components of conscious experience are genuinely simultaneously present, and among those components are color sensations.
Responding to your other question - heterophenomenology is where you agree that other people's phenomenological reports must be explained, but you feel no commitment to the ontologies implied by taking the reports literally. In principle, I have no problem with that. People can be wrong. But I disagree with Dennett's specific eliminations, and especially want to show that they are not necessitated by physical ontology, because physical ontology can be different.
The point of my earlier comment about touching a hot plate (ETA: link) was that once you know that your brain is capable of that kind of fiddling, you ought to be convinced of the essential unreliability of all subjective experiences up to and including unity of consciousness. Like the temporal order of events during a burn, unity of consciousness may not be what it subjectively appears to be, so you don't get to take it as a premise.
So Mitchell's perception of colors as fundamental irreducible qualia could be a similar illusion. Intriguing possibility!
It's not just an intriguing possibility, it's really the only counterargument anyone has, given that no-one has actually produced a way to make color out of noncolor.
Color is a property that objects, light, and experiences may have, not something that can exist independently, so "make color out of noncolor" is incoherent.
In the sense that I think you mean, yes, you are correct: there exists at least one phenomenon that science has not explained in terms of reducing it to more fundamental phenomena.
Now, Mitchell_Porter: do you want me to go over why that shortcoming is an insufficient reason to play "monad of the gaps", or do you think you can connect the dots yourself?
In any case, I already showed you the research program that can attack this problem from a reductionist standpoint and what a solution would look like.
That research program reduces experience to computation. And in a brain that means atoms moving around. I have seen this position asserted in two forms. Color is atoms moving around in a certain way; or color is "how it feels" for atoms to move around in a certain way. The first is the sort of identity which I have been rejecting as outlandish - color is not motion, let alone collective motion.
The second possibly introduces a whole new sort of property to the physicalist vocabulary, "how X feels" where X is some physical event or condition. Where we go from here depends on how this property of feeling-like relates to the purely physical properties making up X. If "how X feels" is just another way of saying "X is the case", then we are back to the first approach. If feeling-like is a new and different sort of property, then we have property dualism - unless feeling-like is itself physically reduced, e.g. to another order of computation, in which case we are back to the first approach after all.
There is a gap and I'm putting a monad in it, yes; the monad is the place where consciousness actually happens. But we shouldn't overstate the difference between our views. In ordinary physical terms, this monad is supposed to be a big bunch of entangled biomolecules, nothing more; it's only when we go beyond making predictions, to asking what physical things actually are, that I insist upon this inversion of the usual approach, whereby (in effect) the physical state of the monad is going to be explained as an abstracted description of its actual, conscious state, rather than the other way around.
When I say "physics contains no color" or "color can't be reduced to physics", I'm talking about the physical ontology you get if you take the physical formalism literally. That ontology contains no color. But I'm not saying that actual color exists in some extra realm outside of physics; the expectation is that it will be there in a slightly modified physics (a monadologized physics), when that physics is properly understood.
But if we skip these philosophical subtleties and just compare your view to mine at the ordinary level of discussion, according to which there is a physical brain and it contains somewhere a physical correlate of consciousness, what are the differences? I'm saying there's a big quantum system somewhere and that is the correlate of consciousness; you're saying there's a distributed classical computation and that is the correlate of consciousness. That's a difference but it's not a radical difference. It's only when we get into the details of how to make such an identification, between subjective and objective, that we get to the really heated differences in this discussion. Of course, it's my views at that level which have motivated me to take the quantum path, so the two levels aren't independent. But I wanted to step back for a moment and indicate how un-exotic a major portion of my hypothesis is.
No, but give me an imperfect self-replicator and a few billion years and I may well be able to produce a creature that perceives, experiences and describes colour in much the same way that Mitchell Porter does.
Monads, midichlorians and phlogiston just aren't required to explain the phenomena that can be seen in the universe.
which proves exactly nothing about whether or how it is being done physically.
They aren't required to expalin the phenomena that have been explained. As to the phenomena that have not been explained...
I'm sorry, where was that comment? I can't find it now.
It was in another discussion: The Friendly singularity one. (I looked at Cyan's user page.)
Ah, I missed that one.
It should have occurred to me to link it. Sorry about that!
Thanks - it's not a huge deal, I just wanted to read the whole convo.
So, given that you accept heterophenomenology, you are proposing a huge, epoch-making change to the way we approach physics solely in order to account for certain utterances people make. I don't think it's enough to say that you think Dennett's eliminations aren't necessary; I think you are going to have to show some pretty big problems with accounting for these utterances while sticking with standard physics if you're to get our attention on this one.
He is probably trying to account for certain experiences he has. if you have never experienced any colours or other quaiia, you are unusual.
Look up heterophenomenology.
I know what it means. it is not clear that Mitchell_Porter has "adopted" heterophenomeonlogy as an exclusive means of epistemic access to the mind. Indeed, the fact that he has a problem with qualia is evidence that he has not.