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HalFinney 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?
Suppose it turned out that the part of the brain devoted to experiencing (or processing) the color red actually was red, and similarly for the other colors. Would this explain anything?
Wouldn't we then wonder why the part of the brain devoted to smelling flowers did not smell like flowers, and the part for smelling sewage didn't stink?
Would we wonder why the part of the brain for hearing high pitches didn't sound like a high pitch? Why the part which feels a punch in the nose doesn't actually reach out and punch us in the nose when we lean close?
I can't help feeling that this line of questioning is bizarre and unproductive.
Hal, what would be more bizarre - to say that the colors, smells, and sounds are somewhere in the brain, or to say that they are nowhere at all? Once we say that they aren't in the world outside the brain, saying they are inside the brain is the only place left, unless you're a dualist.
Most people here are saying that these things are in the brain, and that they are identical with some form of neural computation. My objection is that the brain, as currently understood by physics, consists of large numbers of particles moving in space, and there is no color, smell, or sound in that. I think the majority response to that is to say that color, smell, sound is how the physical process in question "feels from the inside" - to which I say that this is postulating an extra property not actually part of physics, the "feel" of a physical configuration, and so it's property dualism.
If the redness, etc, is in the brain, that doesn't mean that the brain part in question will look red when physically examined from outside. Every example of redness we have was part of a subjective experience. Redness is interior to consciousness, which is interior to the thing that is conscious. How the thing that is conscious looks when examined by another thing that is conscious is a different matter.