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Mitchell_Porter comments on How to think like a quantum monadologist - Less Wrong
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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.