Mitchell_Porter comments on Consciousness - Less Wrong

2 Post author: Mitchell_Porter 08 January 2010 12:18PM

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Comment author: Mitchell_Porter 11 January 2010 04:36:44AM 0 points [-]

He does not use the expression "color feeling", but here's a direct quote from Consciousness Explained, chapter 12, part 4:

You seem to be referring to a private, ineffable something-or-other in your mind's eye, a private shade of homogeneous pink, but this is just how it seems to you, not how it is... what it turns out to be in the real world in your brain is just a complex of dispositions.

He explicitly denies that there is any such thing as a "private shade of homogeneous pink" - which I would consider a reasonably apt description of the phenomenological reality. He also says there is something real, a "complex of dispositions". And, he also says that when we refer to color, we think we're referring to the former, but we're really referring to the latter. So, subjective color does not exist, but references to color do exist.

That still leaves room for there to be "appearances of pink". No actual pink, but also more than a mere belief in pink; some actual phenomenon, appearance, component of experience, which people mistakenly think is pink. But I see no trace of this. The thing which he is prepared to call real, the "complex of dispositions", is entirely cognitive (in the previous paragraph he refers to "innate and learned associations and reactive dispositions"). There is no reference to appearance, experience, or any other aspect of subjectivity.

Therefore, I conclude that not only does Dennett deny the existence of color (yes, I know he still uses the word, but he explicitly defines it to refer to something else), he denies that there is even an appearance of color, a "color feeling". In his account of color phenomenology, there are just beliefs about nonexistent things, and that's it.

Comment author: byrnema 11 January 2010 04:59:32AM *  3 points [-]

So, subjective color does not exist, but references to color do exist.

The references to red together definitely form a physical network in my brain, right? I have a list of 10,000 things in my memory that are vividly red, some more vivid than others, and they're all potentially connected under this label 'red'. When that entire network is stimulated (say, by my seeing something red or imagining what "red" is), might I not also give that a label? I could call the stimulation of the entire network the "essence of red" or "redness" and have a subjective feeling about it.

I'm certain this particular theory about what "redness" occurs frequently. My question is, what's missing in this explanation from the dualist point of view? Why can't the subjective experience of red just be the whole network of red associations being simultaneously excited as an entity?

Above you wrote

Some people are at the stage of saying, color is a neural classification and I don't see any further problem.

So I guess I'm just asking, what's the further problem? (If you've already answered, would you please link to it?)