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

-14 Post author: Mitchell_Porter 15 October 2009 09:37AM

You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.

Comments (266)

You are viewing a single comment's thread. Show more comments above.

Comment author: rhollerith_dot_com 24 October 2009 05:14:08AM *  2 points [-]

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?

If I find that I am able to experience blueness and to experience redness, then my brain must have at least two states, one that corresponds to the blue experience and one that corresponds to the red experience, or we have a contradiction.

The state of my brain that corresponds with the blue experience can be a normal, ordinary, conventional physical state. You have made no progress in persuading me -- or as far as I can tell anyone else who has commented on Less Wrong -- that it must be a special state where a special state is defined as a state that cannot be modeled by the conventional ontological model.

The thing that you refer to as a contradiction is only a contradiction if one mistakenly clings to a particular causal model (or a particular set of causal models) of the sensation of blueness.

I am using "state" the way the computer scientists use it, namely, to mean a configuration of reality or of an "identifiable" aspect of reality (such as my brain) that can change as a function of time.

Comment author: Mitchell_Porter 24 October 2009 09:21:16AM 0 points [-]

I have aggregated my latest responses here.