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Mitchell_Porter comments on How to think like a quantum monadologist - Less Wrong
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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.)
Why do you expect a reductive explanation of the perception of green to be green? The reductive explanation of the temperature of a gas isn't a temperature - it explains temperature in terms of things which are not temperature.
Either admit that you reject any reductive explanation of sensation or describe the phenomena which refute (i.e. render scientifically problematic) any possible explanation of color in terms of neuroscience.
Something somewhere is green. So if you propose an account of the world, reductive or otherwise, which purports to be about greenness, something in it had better actually be green.
Do you dispute in any significant way my assertion that the existing reductive accounts of color seek to reduce it either to causal properties or to configurational properties? Are you willing to defend any particular form of identity theory when it comes to color?
If someone presented an analysis of sensation into parts which, when combined, really did give you back what you started with, I certainly couldn't criticize it on these grounds. Though it's rather hard to imagine what such an analysis could be like. For example, I don't think you can say that color is made of hue, saturation and intensity, in the same way that a square is made of four line segments. The line segments each have an independent existence and being part of a square is a contingent matter for each of them, whereas HSI seem to me like dependent aspects of a necessary unity. You can't have "intensity of color" without actually having a color there.
The reductive analyses being proposed, however, are of a different character. When the parts are put back together, you have a quite different sort of entity, which is why I complain that they are really dualism or eliminativism.
Perhaps, then, color can't be reduced, only described. But that doesn't mean it has to be disconnected from a causal scientific account of the world. If the actual nature of color is that it is a component of certain monadic states, plays a certain specific causal role in the interaction of monads, etc - there's nothing there which is inherently beyond the reach of scientific reasoning.
That doesn't make any sense. Something, somewhere, is a violin. If I propose a reductive account of the violin, none of the component parts I talk about will be a violin. Something, somewhere, is shaped exactly like the building in which I live. A reductive explanation of the building in which I live won't contain any components that are shaped like the building in which I live.
On consideration of Robin Z's earlier example (temperature), I see that in the usual case of reduction, we have a phenomenon (temperature sensations) with a putative cause ("temperature"), and reduction simply clarifies or changes the nature of the cause. But when we have a reductive "explanation" of consciousness, we are engaging with the phenomenon as such and trying to say what sort of thing it is, not what sort of thing it is caused by. And these proposals for what color is are all missing the mark. It is as if I were to say that a violin is really a sentence in a dictionary.
What Alicorn said. Furthermore, the things which are green are things like the leaves on an evergreen, the modern John Deere tractors, and Mountain Dew cans - what we are talking about is the experience associated with seeing green things such as these, which is completely different. (See the comment comparing "blue" to "bluep".)
Your use of technical terminology here is confusing. I imagine color is perceived as a function of the visual response of the cones to the incident light, and the brain uses this input among others to form its internal model of the world - i.e. your subjective experience. Does that answer your question?
And see the discussion which followed. When you define greenness to mean physical greenness, and then say that the experience of green is not itself green in that sense, you are dodging the issue. In naive realism there is no distinction between experience and object of experience, and the only meaning of greenness is the original one. Once you depart from naive realism and distinguish between experience and physical reality, there is a new meaning of greenness which applies to physical reality, and the original meaning of greenness now applies to the experience. And it is greenness in the original sense - the obvious sense, the sense used by everyone when they are not being physicalists - that we are discussing.
Maybe. Do you understand my distinction between the original meaning of greenness, and the derivative meaning of reflecting light at a certain wavelength? If you do understand that distinction, then how do you explain greenness in the original sense? Where is it, in your account of color?
I hope this discussion isn't as frustrating for you as it is for me - I swear I'm nearly at the point of giving up on any communication with you at all. I feel as if nothing I've said has been understood.
I assume by "the original meaning of greenness" you describe a subjective experience (which I shall call greenp for convenience) and by light at a certain wavelength you describe an electromagnetic waveform of a particular sort (which I shall call greenw for convenience).
The usual cause of greenp is, naturally, the incidence of greenw on the color-sensing receptors in an eye. Said incidence causes certain behavior in the optic nerve influencing the operation of the remainder of the brain in a way not well understood (or at all understood, by me), but which through the methods of heterophenomenology may be deduced to cause certain effects in the mind which we refer to as greenp. Given what is known in the field of neuroscience, it is clear that the mind is to a large extent a product of the operation of the brain, much in the way that the videogame is to a large extent a product of the operation of the videogame console - the ambiguities lie purely in the extent to which I/O information should be included in the phenomenon. Thus, just as the appearance of a vehicle in the videogame is associated with certain patterns developing in the RAM of the videogame console, the appearance of greenp in the subjective experience of an observer is associated with certain patterns developing in the neural activations of the brain.
I apologize if I repeat myself, but I cannot reduce it any farther - I'm not a neuroscientist. Greenp is created by the operations of the brain, just as simulated vehicles are created by the operations of the videogame console.
I have aggregated my latest responses here.