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Wei_Dai comments on Consciousness - Less Wrong
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This article contains three simple questions which I want to see answered. To organize the discussion, I'm creating a thread for each question, so people with an answer can state it or link to it. If you link, please provide a brief summary of your answer here as well.
First question: Where is color?
I see a red apple. The redness, I grant you, is not a property of the thing that grew on the tree, the object outside my skull. It's the sensation or perception of the apple which is red. However, I do insist that something is red. But if reality is nothing but particles in space, and empty space is not red, and the particles are not red, then what is? What is the red thing; where is the redness?
Did anyone else notice the similarity of Mitchell's arguments in this post, and the one in his comment to one of my posts? Here he says that there is no color in a purely physical description of a mind, and in his comment to my post he said that there is no utility function in a purely physical description of a mind.
I think this argument actually works better here (with color), because my counter-argument to his comment doesn't work. What I said was that in principle we know how to go from a utility function to a physical description of an object (by creating an AI) and so in principle we also know how to go from a physical description to a utility function.
Here, we don't know how to go from a color to a physical description of a mind that can experience that color, nor can we tell what color a mind is experiencing or capable of experiencing, given a physical description of it. But I'm not sure we should expect this state of affairs to continue forever.