JoshuaZ comments on Three consistent positions for computationalists - Less Wrong
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Comments (176)
It is a little rude of you not to wait for me to answer before insisting that I can't. And it wouldn't hurt to be clear about what the problem is anyway. Color is extremely complicated, and most of the associations that make color perception conscious are not themselves conscious, so I personally certainly couldn't explain color to a blind man. But there's no problem there. And if someone did know enough about color to explain all the associations that it has, well, having associations explained to you isn't normally enough for you to make the same associations in the same way yourself, so perhaps it couldn't enable the blind man to imagine the color. But it's hard to say, and anyway, I don't know why he'd need to be able to imagine it to know what it was. I can say that when I've read articles about how echolocation works, and what sorts of things it reveals or conceals, I've felt like I know a tiny bit more about what it's like to be a bat than I did before reading the articles.
I think you are interpreting Peter's comment in an overly negative fashion. I believe he simply means "it seems that this proposal won't solve the problem of explaining color to a blind person" or something close to that.
I suppose you're right that I was a little snappy, but his response did seem to indicate that he wasn't really paying attention. Indeed, my response to him was too charitable; on rereading Peterdjones comment, he seems to have been responding to some straw-man view on which I claimed it was vividness that made green green, while I responded as if he'd tried to address my actual view (that vividness makes green conscious, and other functional characteristics make it green).