Yvain comments on Being Wrong about Your Own Subjective Experience - Less Wrong

37 Post author: lukeprog 24 April 2011 08:24PM

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Comment author: Yvain 25 April 2011 02:23:13PM 5 points [-]

This is more convincing than Luke's examples, but it's still a case of a flaw in between stimulus and perception, rather than one in consciousness.

You think you perceive a quale of red. Then you think you perceive a quale of black. You notice that you never perceived a quale of change. Each time you are correct about which qualia you did or did not perceive.

You would be wrong if you asserted "my conscious perception of color did not change", but you are correct in asserting "I did not consciously perceive the change in my perception of color."

This may make more sense if you think of perception of change as a specific thing which the brain has to detect and register separate from the changing inputs, rather than as a "natural" consequence of stimuli changing.

This might also make more sense if you think of a Photoshop-style gradient, eg a 200 px gradient between red and blue. You can't perceive a change between each individual pixel and the pixel after it, but pixel 1 is definitely red and pixel 200 is definitely blue. You're not wrong about your conscious experiences at any point, your conscious experience just isn't picking up the change very well.