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lavalamp comments on Does functionalism imply dualism? - Less Wrong
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Sure, colors exist in reality, but they are patterns of neuronal excitations, not molecules. I don't see how this belief makes me a dualist. Actually this belief killed my belief in dualism.
Maybe I misread you, but I hear your post as saying, "Colors must exist in the territory, not just the map!" And I can't see why you believe that so strongly.
PS I greatly prefer this post to your previous one.
Thank you for producing a perfect example of what I called the "incomplete chain of thought"! What I called "subjective space" and "physical space", you have called "map" and "territory". This thing you call a "map", conscious experience, is part of the "territory" - part of reality - which itself is supposed to be coextensive with physics. So locating colors on the map doesn't get them off the territory. If everything real is made of physics, you still must either explain how certain patterns of neuronal excitations are actually green, or you must assert that nothing is actually green at any level of reality.
But that's just saying that lavalamp has a unique responsibility to solve the hard problem - everyone already knows it needs to be solved, and nobody knows how to do it. It doesn't undermine functionalism in particular. It's an open problem; we could just as well say that you must explain how [your preferred explanation of consciousness] is actually green.
Thank you. I've been typing and retyping trying to say that. I just gave up and refreshed and you'd done it already!
I guess I'm a little too tired.
Upvoted for stroking my ego.
Certain patterns of neuronal excitations feel like green from the inside. I don't understand this well enough to write a conscious computer program, but neither does anyone else (thank Bayes). I do believe that such a computer program can be written, and if that can be shown to be impossible, I will reconsider my position here (conversely, it seems that you must hold that no such computer program can be written).
It may happen that "nothing is actually green at any level of reality", and in that case, I still say that certain patterns of neuronal excitations feel like green from the inside, even if it's an illusion.
"Certain patterns of neuronal excitations feel like green from the inside."
If patterns are not a fundamental part of reality, but merely the mind's mapping of an uncaring territory, why should patterns feel anything from the inside, as opposed to being felt merely from the outside?
By saying that patterns feels something from the inside, you seem to claim that patterns are a part of reality that isn't merely the sum of their parts.
The patterns are an organization of reality that has higher-level meaning to our minds. The meaning, as with everything, is in the interpretation, not the physical atoms.
This is interesting, true, and really complicates any quest to maintain an accurate map.
Upvoted (the OP too). I think some of your interlocutors may be thinking past you here, in the sense that they have dismissed your central point as a triviality. But there are fundamental differences between interactions of particles in the open universe, the state changes that particle interactions cause in our sensory machinery, and what it feels like to be a brain having an experience. The suggestion that the experience of green might be illusory fails to consider that it is something occurring in a physical brain. In this sense, the most dismissive thing we might say about any quale is that it doesn't have the meaning we readily assign to it, but that's different from a claim of nonexistence.
I'm not philosophically sophisticated enough to judge whether this observation implies dualism. I think perhaps we'd find a lot more common ground if we discussed our expectations rather than our definitions (especially given the theological baggage that the term dualism carries).
I agree that this "map" is part of the "territory", and that's because the map that we're trying to construct in philosophy - an ontology - is a map claiming to cover everything in the universe including maps.
This is a 'why' question, not a 'how' question, and though some 'why' questions may not be amenable to deeper explanations, 'how' questions are always solvable by science. Explaining how neuronal patterns generate systems with subjective experiences of green is a straightforward, though complex, scientific problem. One day we may understand this so well that we could engineer quales on demand, or create new types of never before seen quales according to some transformation rules. However, explaining 'why' such arrangements of matter should possess such interiority or subjectivity is, I think at least based on everything we currently know, unanswerable.