Jandila comments on Blindsight and Consciousness - Less Wrong

14 Post author: atucker 22 September 2011 06:42PM

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Comment author: AdeleneDawner 30 September 2011 10:27:40PM 5 points [-]

Hm.

Perhaps I'm conflating 'talk' and 'communicate' in a non-useful way. A significant part of my point is that I can't communicate these qualia - there's no way to render green-and-purple or yellow-in-grey in such a way as to actually get the sensation across, that I know of, and if I tried with some things in most situations I suspect I'd just come across as crazy. But if I'm talking to someone who assigns the idea that I may experience qualia that they don't a sufficiently high prior compared to the idea that I am crazy, and I explicitly take steps to bridge the inferential gap (like saying 'synesthesia'), I can probably communicate that I am experiencing something unusual, even if I can't communicate what. But this assumes that I have the relevant skills, and a sufficiently sympathetic or open-minded person to communicate with, and it's fairly easy for me to imagine someone experiencing qualia that are far enough from the things that we have words for that the inferential gap is too wide to cross and they always come across as crazy if they try to talk about it. (We wouldn't actually notice such cases, I expect, because people in those situations would learn at a fairly young age that talking about the relevant classes of qualia is not useful.)

If we're just talking about talking itself, though - if you're simply asking whether I can say some arbitrary word when I experience a particular quale or group thereof - then yes, that's much simpler. Strictly speaking I'd suspect it's subject to a degree of false-positive, though. I don't think it's all that uncommon to get caught up in a conversation and blurt out something that's useful, true, and entirely surprising on a conscious level, for example.

Comment author: [deleted] 04 October 2011 03:53:48AM 0 points [-]

Upvoted for the possibly-frivolous reason that I've never met anyone else whose synaesthesia works this way, and you're putting words to a basic feature of life experience I can scarcely explain to others.