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tzachquiel comments on Open thread, Feb. 16 - Feb. 22, 2015 - Less Wrong
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This is true, but it doesn't change the fact that I am experiencing colors when I look at them. Why is there "redness" or "blueness" to begin with?
But being able to distinguish between colors or sounds isn't the problem I'm trying to address. The problem for me is, why do colors have metadata associated with them while sound does not?
What about (for example) "low" and "high"? ("What if low pitches sound to you the way high pitches sound to me, and vice versa?")
Hmmm. That could be true. But it still doesn't feel like there are qualia associated with sound in that way; for low pitches you can actually hear the individual vibrations, so to me it doesn't seem like it's possible for you to be hearing what I hear as a high note. The true nature of the sound is apparent at such low pitches, and it's as if there's nowhere for qualia to be hiding.
The core question here is: For how many colors do you have something like "redness" or "blueness" and what does it take to get that for a new color.
Particularly it takes a name. The name is metadata. It's makes the thing a primitive. An important step from going from vague feelings of difference to things with metadata is to give it a name. At least that's what I happen to believe at the moment.
I don't think perceiving color as qualia requires a name-- in Women, Fire, and Dangerous Things, Lakoff describes a lot of research on how people classify color. While some languages have more words than others for colors, there's good agreement on what the best example is for each color, and a sequence for the order in which color words appear in each language.
Also, even if there's a word which covers red and orange, best examples of the color peak at what we would call a good red or a good orange,
The experience of how perceiving the sound "C3" is different from perceiving the sound of a raindrop also seems very incommunicable. I don't think I could communicate it to a person who's completely deaf.
I don't think that's what you need the name for. tzachquiel speaks about "metadata". A name adds "metadata" that goes beyond what was there beforehand.
Emotions are quite interesting in that regard. It changes things to put a label on a sensation. In Focusing, putting a label on the sensation is an essential part. It's also a step in the Sedona method. Taking a label away can also make certain process such a EmoTrance easier.
If you want to describe how you are angry you can talk about how your heart rate rises and how you feel sensations in your belly but the label "anger" adds incommunicable metadata to it. It changes the experience.
Fear also raises emotions and might also let's you feel sensation in your belly but it's different in a way that just doesn't boil down to raised heart rate and inner movement.
I'm reasonably sure that my experience of Focusing being different from ordinary use of language is typical-- ordinary use involves accepting approximate words for experience, while Focusing takes a lot more time to find words that feel satisfyingly exact.
I agree that there's metadata associated with sounds as well as color.
Though there are many specific shades that I would group under the category "red", each one is it's own separate experience and I can distinguish colors very finely (I get a perfect score on this color sorting test) and remember them later. I do not believe naming the categories is the cause of qualia, because I also name sounds (C, E-flat, oboe, violin, etc.) and I don't experience the same thing with sound as I do with color.
That still opens the door to find colors for which you don't have a separate experience at the moment and develop a separate experience.
The proliferation of incommunicable experiences doesn't seem like a good way to solve this problem :) But on a related note, that's actually a good idea for some Anki cards; learn a bunch of more fine-grained color names and become able to better remember them. Of course, the fidelity of the screen will become important at that point...
The interesting thing is studying the process of what happens when you build more of them. It might be possible to systematize the process and then find out something interesting through quantitative analysis.
If you want I can send you the deck. My deck has all CSS color names and also finer distinction via hex numbers.
Otherwise I have thought a bit about the issue. Redness is not only a single color but also a dimension. If you take any two colors you can compare them in their redness. You can't compare to notes by how much "C" they are. A note is either C or it isn't.