[Y]our conscious understanding of the experience of perception is only the merest shadow of the perception itself.
Of course. If I had perfect knowledge of my brain's functioning, now that would be a very strange thing indeed.
You can imagine the state of having switched that "red" experience with the "green" experience, in all your memories as well as in current perception, and still instantly knowing that the switch had occurred.
No, I can't. If all my memories had been altered to agree with my newly-altered perception system, what difference would I detect? How would I detect it? Different from what?
The hypothetical situation I mean is one where your current retina is reprogrammed to switch red and green stimuli, and your memories are edited so that you don't figure it out from inconsistencies, but everything else is left the same.
The fact that there's subconscious cognitive content to red vs. green can be deduced from things like instinctive reactions† to the sight of blood: the brain doesn't check the color against the memory of other blood, it reacts faster than that to to perception. The emotional valence of colors would seem off somehow after a ...
This is our monthly thread for collecting these little gems and pearls of wisdom, rationality-related quotes you've seen recently, or had stored in your quotesfile for ages, and which might be handy to link to in one of our discussions.