Cyan comments on Consciousness - Less Wrong

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

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Comment author: Mitchell_Porter 10 January 2010 01:32:07AM 2 points [-]

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?

Comment author: Cyan 15 January 2010 02:58:55PM 0 points [-]

What would be your reply to

But if reality is nothing but quantum monads in space, and empty space is not red, and the quantum monads are not red, then what is?

Comment author: Mitchell_Porter 16 January 2010 05:53:05AM -2 points [-]

The redness must be in the monad. The point of postulating monads is to have an ontological correlate to the phenomenological unity of consciousness. Redness is interior to consciousness, which is interior to the thing that is conscious. A theory of monads might have an intermediate stage of incomplete descriptions, in which it is described purely formally, mathematically, and causally, but the objective is to have a theory in which there is something recognizably identical with a total instantaneous conscious experience. This is also the point of reverse monism.