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aaronsw comments on Mixed Reference: The Great Reductionist Project - Less Wrong
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and why not?
Because the neuron firing pattern is presumably the cause of the quale, it's certainly not the quale itself.
I don't understand what else is there.
Imagine a flashlight with a red piece of cellophane over it pointed at a wall. Scientists some day discover that the red dot on the wall is caused by the flashlight -- it appears each and every time the flashlight fires and only when the flashlight is firing. However, the red dot on the wall is certainly not the same as the flashlight: one is a flashlight and one is a red dot.
The red dot, on the other hand, could be reduced to some sort of interaction between certain frequencies of light-waves and wall-atoms and so on. But it will certainly not get reduced to flashlights.
By the same token, you are not going to reduce the-subjective-experience-of-seeing-red to neurons; subjective experiences aren't made out of neurons any more than red dots are made of flashlights.
Ok, that's where we disagree. To me the subjective experience is the process in my brain and nothing else.
There's no arguemnt there. Your point about qualia is illustrated by your point about flashlights, but not entailed by it.
How do you know this?
There's no certainty either way.