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Psychohistorian comments on Consciousness - Less Wrong
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Comments (221)
A trillion tiny particles moving in space is like a "private shade of homogeneous pink" in that it reflects light that stimulates nerves that generate a private shade of homogenous pink. If you forbid even this relationship, you've assumed your conclusion. If not, you use "nothing" too freely. If this is a factual claim, and not an assumption, I'd like to see the research and experiments corroborating it, because I doubt they exist, or, indeed, are even meaningfully possible at this time.
To use my previous example, the electrical impulses describing a series of ones and zeroes are "nothing like" lesswrong.com, yet here we are.
I'm referring to the particles in the brain, some aspect of which is supposed to be the private shade of color.
I don't see how this is meaningfully distinct from Alicorn's sweater. Sweater-ness is not a property of cloth fibers or buttons.
I think the real problem here is that consciousness is so dark and mysterious. Because the units are so small and fragile, we can't really take it apart and put it back together again, or hit it with a hammer and see what happens. Our minds really aren't evolved to think about it, and, without the ability to take it apart and put it back together and make it happen in a test tube - taking good samples seems to rather break the process - it's extremely difficult to force our minds to think about it. By contrast, we're quite used to thinking about sweaters or social organization or websites. We may not be used thinking about say, photosynthesis or the ATP cycle, but we can take them apart and put them back together again, and recreate them in a test tube.